NAS Access in Catalina issues

Just tried an experiment:

• Logged into User Account1: no access to the NAS from Finder
• Switched to User Account2: no problem accessing any folder on the NAS from Finder
• Switched back to User Account1: same issue as before

Damm!

And no it's not related to user credentials, because if I reboot I will be able access the NAS from User Account1 (and I never had any issue with this account until Catalina).

hey bsanders44,

To begin with, I had some the same problems you're having.  However, since 10.15.2, my network connection to my NAS and Time Machine have not missed a beat.  OK, the set-up looks different now, but it's reliable.

So, maybe, you've got a few gremlins... turned-sideways.  And, both the ox and the cart are in the ditch.  Here's a procedure that just may set things to rights.

First, let's see if we can perform a few house-cleaning chores and lose the NAS from macOS recent memory: 

1. Disconnect your NAS from the network but leave the power on.
2. At "Go>>Connect to Server", remove any previous server-path listed there.  Also, be sure to use the "gear" (settings) icon to "clear recent servers".
3. At Time Machine app>>Select Disk, highlight the current disk and remove.
4. Shut-down you Mac completely.
5. Perform the SMC reset: unplug the machine from power for 15 seconds, plug the machine back in, wait 5 seconds, then hit the start button.
6. After the machine has booted and you're logged in, check Finder to see if your NAS appears in the side-bar under Network.
7. Even if the NAS is no longer listed, perform one more re-start your Mac.
8. Perform another check in Finder to make sure your NAS is no longer listed in the side-bar under Network.  
9. Once you are sure it is gone, shut-down your Mac.

This ends the house-cleaning part of this resolution.

At this point, perform the following to restore the NAS connection:

1. Connect your NAS back to the network.  
2. Once the NAS indicates it has a "network connection", power-up your Mac and allow it to boot, and log-in.
3. Go to Finder, open Network and allow at least 5 minutes for any or all of your network devices to check-in (appear).
4. At this point, you may see the NAS unit's device name appear in the Network folder and subsequently as a "stand-alone" entry in the Sidebar.  Yes, macOS discovered my NAS on it's own!  And, I no longer have to use the NAS IP address for Time Machine!)
5. Using the stand-alone entry, you may see your NAS device name waiting to "connect as:" the primary user name of you drive. (In my situation it did.  However, I change it to the "user" name I had previously setup for my "TimeMachineBackup" share.)
6. Do not use "Go>Connect to Server"!
7. Do look for the "eject icons" at each folder level in Finder.  To me, this indicates a successful, stable device connection that will survive a "re-boot". 

Give the above a try and see what happens.  It shocked the crap out of me after I saw it fix mine.

Good luck!  Let me know if anything happens.

Best regards,

OM2

I'm very sorry to hear "no joy"!

A few questions, if I may be nosey:

1. How does your MacBook "network" with the NAS? Is there a switch and/or router somewhere in there? Right after Catalina was released and I installed it, I was able to resolve a connectivity problem by just re-booting my router. If there are other network devices involved, and both MacBook and NAS have "static" IP addresses, you might try temporarily connecting them directly to see if your network devices are contributing to your problem.
2. What device name is associated with your NAS? (I don't expect an answer, BTW.). If you changed it from the default, you might check to see if it now contains any spaces. Just to make sure, however, if you did change it, maybe try renaming the NAS back to the original factory default.
3. And speaking of factory default, do you have a "non-destructive" (data) option to factory default your drive unit? I do remember having a non-related issue with my drive that required I default the unit. It only affected the operating system and left data intact.

Best regards,

OM2

So I am finally able to see the NAS again in Finder, under Network. To get to this point, I:

• Cleared all the credentials for the NAS from Keychain, as @cemento suggested
• Removed all favorite and recent servers from Finder > Go > Connect to Server
• Removed any connections from my Mac within the NAS
• Restarted my computer

For some reason the NAS still doesn't show directly in the sidebar of Finder, but only under Network (it used to show in both, before I tried the proposed workaround of connecting via IP with Finder > Go > Connect to Server), but at least it's there somewhere.

Unfortunately, the original problem persists, and the connections are still going into a bad state after some time. I would agree that there seems to be an issue in the kernel or one of the low-level libraries that causes the Mac to improperly manage the connection/mount for the NAS; however, it seems that there may be other, related issues as well (such as in Finder) that are complicating attempts to isolate the issue. The connect via IP workaround, in particular, only managed to make things worse for me.

I was having this problem with Catalina and my Synology, and this article solved it for me.

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

The Cause Of The macOS Catalina NAS Connection Failure

From what we can tell, this issue is happening because Apple apparently dropped support for SMB1 and SMB 2.0 in macOS Catalina. With many NAS defaulting to SMB1 for compatibility reasons, users will immediately lose the ability to connect once they upgrade to macOS Catalina.

The Fix:

1. Log into your NAS
2. Go to Control Panel > File Services.
3. Under the SMB section, click on Advanced Settings.
4. In the Advanced Settings pop-up, you will find that the Maximum SMB protocol is probably set to SMB1.
5. You need to set the Maximum SMB protocol to SMB3.
6. Now, this is not necessary, but while you are here, you might as well just set the Minimum SMB protocol to SMB2 and Large MTU.
7. Then click Apply at the bottom of the Advanced Settings pop-up to save the settings.

I did it and my Synology NAS access from Catalina has been rock solid for the last 48 hours!!!!

Of course, my setup is:

• iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) connected via ethernet through GS108 then to the GS116Ev2 then into the NAS boxes
• 2 x QNAP TS-453Be
• 1 x QNAP TS-451+
• Microtik router as supplied by my broadband provider (pretty standard out of the box config)
• GS116Ev2 - 16-Port Gigabit Ethernet Smart Managed Plus Switch
• GS108 - Netgear Prosafe Gigabit 8 port smart switch

All NAS boxes are set to use SMB 2.1 & SMB 3 only!! I would never want to go as far back as SMB 1 due to the speed being so poor.

I did have these drives set to auto connect when I login to the machine as a login item under my user profile.

So what I did was as follows:

1. Logged into the QNAP admin dashboard and ensured all drives where set to be using SMB 2.1 or SMB 3 and not SMB 1
2. Disconnected from all drives
3. Removed all drives from my login items
4. Removed drive shortcuts from the Finder sidebar
5. Removed all credentials to these drives from Keychain Access
6. Ran sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder
7. Restarted the machine and reconnected to the drives in Finder using credentials on the drives which have administrator access
8. Added drives back to my login items

Since doing all this I have had no issues with connections to the drives other than at startup when I get a message during the loading of login items where OS says it cannot connect to the drive, I simply hit okay and it seemingly connects after that anyway. These mounts stay on the machine without any issues and remain connected without dropouts since I did all of this.

It appears as though you need to remove all traces of the drives and connections from your machine to then go back in and add them fresh again. Still doesn't explain why I had no issues on my Macbook Pro though which also runs Catalina...

@Mike_App,

I fully support your proposal, here is my configuration (I have hopes with the upcoming Catalina upgrade):

• Catalina 10.15.4
• Synology DS218+
• 1 LAN used, directly connected to router (no switch)
• DSM Version 6.2.2-24922 Update 4 (Control Panel > Infos Center)
• NAS currently not opened to outside world
• 2 HD 4 To, Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR)
• I set a fixed IP on my router for Synology (192.168.1.57 / DNS 192.168.1.1)
• Packet Center installed:
  • Universal Search
  • Hyper Backup
  • File Station
• Network traffic: MacBook Air (2019) connected on an Elgato Dock Thunderbolt Pro 3 connected via LAN to a WiFi relay.

Fly_PetitPrince

PS: this night, first time that my TimeMachine did not work on NAS, usually I only encounter problems via Finder and TimeMachine always worked...

Accessing the shares through a "Favorites" shortcut seem to work so far. It's only been a few days, may just be a coincidence.

Many of the solutions proposed don't seem to work.

• My NAS is set to SMB 3, but I still get disconnected. Either can't login or lose connection soon. So it's not just that.
• I've tried through "Go > Connect to server" (Command-K), by IP address and that connection drops also.

Strangely my TimeMachine never had a problem. It does use SMB and is pointing to the server share by name. In my case "TS-231P(TimeMachine).local". But I never try to access that directly through Finder.

In the past few days I haven't had an issue when accessing my shares directly from the link in Favorites whereas I do have a problem when accessing the server by name (TS-231P) in "Locations". I think I even have issues with APF, if I recall correctly I also had a problem accessing the AFP connection in "Locations" (TS-23P(AFP)).

I'll come back and share if I have an update.

Hi Mike_App,

thx for the honour, citating me.

The price was .... census again.

Guys fom apple, you can - as much as you want - apply the hongkong approach - the TRUTH will not change.

And the truth is not warm and promissing ... it is ice cold and dark ... Mordor is a family home compared to that truth.

So .. i do not care ... hurry up and delete. But those guys with email notification .. they have it anyhow in their mailbox .. the truth.

Like:

• I was an apple nerd. but I have seen so many silly design decisions.
• So many things that get worse and many many gimmick stuff but not an increase of productivity.

All this - despite your motivation - will cause me to behave as follows:

• NO NEW Version on my machine until it publicly is noted as stable and those things needed at most do their work.
• NEVER again trust a new release. I was very trustful - by experience - and this time did ignore the admin katechism .. I did NOT Backup.

...

My Mac btw is a New Pro Book with 32 gigs of RAM and the FINDER brings this machine to almost stop working.

UNBELIEVABLE for the costs of the netincome of two months of a standard family.

• THAT is NOT acceptable.
• Regain trust and believe of your customers and stop the way you develop NEW concepts and technology that is gimmick based.
• Take your customers serious .. without them you'd not be on earth.
• wrong attempt.

@Martin Deisting,

The Synology NAS is connected by its IP-adress in Finder (GO - Connect to server).

The Time Machine share was dragged to the Finder left column.

I also implemented a Automount app (ConnectMeNow, it is in Dutch), but that does not seem to help very much. If Time Machine is launched, it opens the share directly.

After applying this, I have not had the horrible message above that the TM bundle is corrupted, for more than 1 week now. (always nice to see this in French also...., misere international, non?)

For the sake of reliability, TM is also making a backup on a local USB-drive.

Bad news, unfortunately, the problem re-appeared for me :-(((

Just to be sure that I did everything correctly:

• typing "sudo nvram {...}" in Terminal as you explained
• reboot
• CTRL+K to connect to smb://192.168.1.75 in my case
• Then double click on the folder of my Time Machine (TM in my case)
• I did not drag & drop the share in the left column of the finder, I will do so to see if it changes something
• Launch again Time Machine (from scratch on my side)

--> it did not solve my case neither for accessing NAS nor to be able to perform the Time Machine backup.

Nothing else ?

Of course, I do backup on a separate USB Disk of course, but unless I am mistaken, I can't backup this Time Machine backup on an alternative disk to keep it safe, reason why I also do a Time Machine on my NAS (to allow another alternative in case the USB Hard Disk break - and usually, USB Hard Disk is with MAC, and therefore if MAC is stolen, Hard Disk as well...)

Do you think that the TM "horrible misère internationale" as you said is linked to this Finder connection ???

Any other idea ?

Fly

<quote>

• “I did not drag & drop the share in the left column of the finder, I will do so to see if it changes something“

</quote>

@Fly_PetitPrice you tried the most complicated workarounds before trying the simplest thing that many people said worked for them? Let us know how accessing your shares from “Favorites” works if you try. It did for me, but I never had a TM issue, only share access.

@Fly

I can only guess why the TM message appears.

In my case the following occurred:

• a new TM backup was made on the NAS, via SMB
• the new backup lasted several hours, approximately 250GB of data, this backup ended normally
• the next TM (incremental) backup fails, with the horrible message
• nothing was changed in te Finder, OSC System Preferences or the NAS configuration

My assumption is that the connection with (parts of the) the NAS is somehow lost and TM cannot find parts of the Sparse Bundle. I read somewhere that TM uses hard links. If something goes wrong with these hard links, TM can only conclude that the backup is corrupted and start all over again with a new initial backup.

I get the feeling that there is something wrong with discovery, naming and adressing in Catalina.

Perhaps something with connection timeouts on TCP layer 5 in Catalina. The TCP connection with the NAS is okay, as the web interface with Synology DSN is working all te time. The mentioned NVRAM fix seems to be doing something in the timing area.

As long as Apple does not disclose any details on this problem, we can only guess, unfortunately.

Perhaps we can dig deeper by looking at Wireshark traces. For me this goes too far: if my car breaks down, I bring it to the dealer.

Anyway: the following workaround solved all my problems (for now):

• apply the NVRAM fix by Bob Zelin
• set up a SMB connection for TM in the NAS
• define a server SMB connection from Finder to the IP-address of the NAS
• open all share on the NAS from Finder
• drag the TM share to the Finder Locations pane = left column
• select the TM share in the TM preferences
• start a initial or incremental TM backup

This is working for more than 1 week now. Also my other shares on the NAS (music, video, document, etc) keep working.

Cheers,

Martin

I held off installing Catalina for a long time because I read about the SMB issues. Three weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and installed Catalina 10.15.5.

It turned out that SMB is working great for me. It keeps working after sleep etc... Last week I updated to 10.15.6 and everything is still working OK.

So while that worked out good for me, I wondered why it was working for me and not for others. I can think of this:

• I applied the workaround Cemento described before updating to Catalina. By the way my NAS always remains under 'Locations' and I also never get question marks.
• I have my iMac connected with a network cable (I do not use WiFi)
• I don't use Time Machine. But I do use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a daily backup to my NAS over the network, and that is working fine.

I thought I just share my experience, maybe it will help some others.

I have a work around that appears to be working for me on Catalina 10.15.6. If I reboot the Mac, Finder works when I click on the NAS but after 30 mins or so, it just won't connect. So this is what I have done

1. Reboot and click on the NAS. For about 30 mins, you should have access.
2. All the folders appear
3. Make an Alias for any folders required and copy these to your desktop
4. Double click the Alias and the folders are mounted and accessible even when they aren't in Finder

Whether this solves everyones problem, I don't know but hope it is helpful.

@Mike_App

I actually did not use the Go > Connect to server method of accessing the drives/shares, as that approach caused major issues for me previously. Instead I rebooted my computer, then went into Finder > Preferences > General > Show these items on the desktop, and checked Connected Servers (see screenshot.) Then I went into the sidebar in Finder, and under Locations, connected to my NAS. Once connected, the icons appeared automatically on my desktop, and I dragged them to the Favorites section of the Finder sidebar.

If you are seeing question marks, try rebooting your computer, and then follow the steps above. In my experience (and in the experience of several others in this thread), using the Go > Connect to server method eventually caused serious issues, especially after the computer and NAS were restarted.

PS. I have used this approach on two Macs on my network, and it is currently working.