NAS Access in Catalina issues

If you have one, try re-booting your router.

I too had trouble tickets at both Apple and Western Digital regarding my inability to connect reliably with Catalina.

Since I could reach the drive's web-hosted OS "dashboard", I finally assumed it must be a network data transport protocol issue. After by-passing the switches with no improvement, the router became the prime culprit.

Power-cycling the router fixed the problem.

It really bugs me when gremlins show up coincident with an OS upgrade. (I now have a come-up on my phone to remind me to do this once-a-month. But, I should have been doing this anyway since residential router are historically notorious for shenanigans like this.)

OM2

It continues to fail because Catalina can’t fully resolve information from your NAS. Sounds like it’s an issue with your network router, not Catalina. I had same problem as you. Re-booting my router fixed it.

BTW, I just use “afp://192.168.0.131”, (yours will be different, of course). Works for “SMB” connections as well to my NAS.

Catalina now automatically ”connects as: admin”, which is the default user defined by my NAS. If I “disconnect: admin”, Catalina then automatically “connects as: guest”, because “guest” is a hidden, protected “system word“ used by the NAS’s OS. My point here is that user info from the NAS was being blocked by a router anomaly.

Check-out my previous response.

Best regards,

OM2

I don't think it is router issue. Because I rebooted my router pervious but the issue still here.

I also have a MacBook Air which is the old system. I think it is 10.14.

The MacBook Air does not have any issue like this.

I still can't fully rationalize how a router re-boot solved my problem. After upgrading to Catalina, I was unable to reconnect to a network drive unit I have used with no problems for four years. The two most significant things I did at the time, to resolve this problem, was a re-boot of my iMac, then later, my router. After that, the drive unit almost installed itself!

I noticed Apple has released macOS 10.15.2 update today. Maybe there will be something in it that will help you resolve the problem you are having with your drive unit.

Best regards,

OM2

I think I found the issue. I used the admin account but I did not admin account access homes folder. I found if I try to access homes folder, I will get the error message. Then I cannot access any folders in my NAS.

I think maybe Apple tried to access all "available" folder in the background. After it failed in some folders which the account cannot access, then we will see the error message.

> I think I found the issue. I used the admin account but I did not admin account access homes folder.

> I found if I try to access homes folder, I will get the error message. Then I cannot access any folders in my NAS.

I just tried this, open access to all shared folders on my NAS (Synology) to user admin, restarted Finder, but no luck. The Finder says "Connecting..." and never connects. Pressing the "Connect..." button does not have any effect (which is a nuisance really, because a button should always be responsive). Sigh...

I found in this website

https://www.techarp.com/software/macos-catalina-nas-failure/

that the issue could be due to Catalina dropping support for previous SMB protocols.

Requesting the NAS to avoid using SMB1 should at least allow to access the using the NAS name instead of the IP, like "smb://NAS-NAME".

However, I manage to access from Finder only with Ctrl-k, direct connection using the left panel in Finder does not work

> that the issue could be due to Catalina dropping support for previous SMB protocols.

I tried a while back to enable only SMB1, or SMB2, or SMB3 on the NAS, but this did not help. Also, the issue goes away (for a little while only -sad!) after a fresh reboot, so it cannot be related to dropping a protocol, otherwise the issue would be present always.

I’ll just add here that some combination of rebooting my router, restarting Finder, and rebooting my iMac fixed this for me. So the theory that it could be related to a router issue holds some weight.

So, I have 2 laptops on Catalina and a Mac Mini and MacBook Pro on Mavericks. The Mac's running on Mavericks: No problem using my NeadyNAS (NetGear). The Catalina Macs: One has no issues, the other: can see the NAS, and the shares, but won't list what's inside of the share.

Definitely flakey.

Are both Catalina Macs “connected as:” the same NAS user?

Also, do the network paths (folders) in Finder both display “eject” icons at each level? (Sometimes it seems like you have to “wake” these up by clicking each folder.)

in other words, are the network connection set-ups the same for both computers?

best regards,

OM2

I have the same issues with my WD Mycloud ex2 ultra device. Since my update to macOS Catalina, the connection with the network drive dropped often and no timemachine backups could be made, while the webinterface of my NAS could be reached at all times. The only difference was the macOS Catalina update.

Disabling AFS and using SMB did not fix the problem, neither did updating the firmware of the NAS and my network router. Ultimately I got it to work giving my NAS a fixed IP address (e.g. 192.168.1.254), connecting to my NAS in finder using Command+K to afs://192.168.1.254 and thereafter pointing to the share on that specific IP in timemachine settings. It’s not ideal, but it seems to work.

If you use a router to connect to your NAS, give it a re-boot.

Also, and I don’t know why, but re-starting your Mac seems to help. Maybe it removes “previous attempt garbage”!

Finally, in Finder, make sure you are “connected to:” the default user name of the NAS (it’s probably “admin” like my EX4).

if you think this set-up works for you, the final test will be to see if it survives a re-start of your Mac.

Good luck and best regards,

OM2

Hi there,

Just my feedback as well, since 10.15.6, I do not have anymore the issue with connecting to the Synology NAS and no more disconnection so far. All Fine.

As for the Time Machine weird message I had "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability Time Machine must complete a new backup for you.", it's linked to a recent Norton Security update (I had no problem so far, and suddenly experiences the issue). As explained here: https://community.norton.com/en/forums/norton-security-857-broke-time-machine-backup

Fly

I had everything working fine and in the last few weeks the usual issues had started resurrecting themselves. Most noticeable when running daily backups to a NAS using Carbon Copy Cloner. On the advice above I switched off WiFi on the machine and have used Ethernet only. All back working fine... I have always had Ethernet as the highest in the list of network connections but it seems something to do with connecting via WiFi as well cause the issues with the NAS connection. All back to stable again for now at least