Recommend a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive for Time Machine backups, please

Just understand that when you boot into Recovery, and want to restore from a Time Machine backup, it does not support NAS drives, only USB mounted Time Machine drives.

I have a Synology with TBs of storage on it, and still do not use it as a Time Machine backup device for the reason of the first paragraph.

You will want to confirm with the maker of the NAS that their device supports "Time Machine over SMB".

NAS devices from QNAP and Promise Technologies both support TM over SMB, but regardless of the vendor you need to 100% confirm with their support if they do support TM over SMB. Sometimes this can be added with a firmware upgrade as well. You'll want to make sure you get a write-up as to how to do this, because the NAS settings to allow TM to work vary sharply between manufacturer's and models.

Synology

Use Seagate “IronWolf” drives.

With some Googling, you can find instructions to use the Synology as part of the restoration.

One approach is to use Recovery partition to install a new OS, then mount the Synology and use Migration Assistant to bring the stuff back.

There is one set of instructions that uses the Terminal in Recovery mode to mount the synology. Not trivial, but it can be done.

I do not JUST use Synology for my backups (Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper are used on different Macs, besides the Synology). And if necessary, I'm prepared to transfer the files to another direct attached storage medium to complete my restore.

rebbi wrote:

Good point, and yes, I was aware of that. It turns out, though, that you can also use this Raspberry Pi hardware setup to run Time Machine back ups via Samba (SMB) to which macOS seems to be migrating. As in this link, here: https://kirb.me/2018/03/24/using-samba-as-a-time-machine-network-server.html

Unless the NAS supports "Time Machine of SMB" specification, you are not fully supported and it will likely be just as unreliable as using the netatalk failure.

Are you aware Apple is dropping AFP?

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/285417/is-afp-slated-to-be-removed-from-future-versions-of-macos

Yes, the problem is if AFS is still enabled or in Favorites & APFS is in use it won't work at all.

:)

:)