Time machine on Ventura no longer works with a network drive

I have been trying to sort out why Time Machine has suddenly stop automatically backing up to our Time Capsule. After talking with multiple Mac technical support staff (I'm currently once again on the phone with one), I still have no resolution.

After no luck getting it to work with my Time Capsule, I thought it might have something to do with either the disk beginning to fail or incompatibility with the firmware and Ventura. I created a network drive with my LinkSys MR9000 and a Western Digital 4TB SSD. No problem getting the network drive to work. No problem in getting time machine to connect to the network drive. Time machine started to create the sparse bundle. It never completed. Now its saying the sparse is busy? Busy doing what?

This is exactly the same problem I was having with my Time Capsule. We have two Macs that have the same problem with trying to get Time Machine on ventura working with a network drive. I haven't tried it with the drive connected directly to my Mac. Is there a developer in Apple that is motivated enough to solve this problem.

BTW: I have a Masters in Computer Engineering. I written OS code. There is something in Ventura that has broken Time Machine backing up to a local network attached drive.

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 13.5

Posted on Sep 10, 2023 8:14 AM

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Barney-15E

Level 10

125,056 points

Posted on Jan 3, 2024 9:43 AM

according to you, Apple’s, support didn’t say it didn’t work they said Apple does not support it which means they’re not going to test every router on the market to see i that router’s SMB protocol meets the Time Machine over SMB specification. That task is the responsibility of the router manufacturer.

The article you linked only tricks it into seeing a device it can use. What you will probably discover is it like every other NAS that is not supported, your router’s SMB protocol does not support the Time Machine over SMB specification which does error checking to ensure the back up is written correctly. Most of the time, Time Machine will eventually report that the backup has become corrupted and must be rebuilt. Other people don’t find out that the time machine backup has been corrupted until they attempt to restore in a desperate situation.

Prior to Apple adopting SMB, NAS devices used a reverse engineered AFP (Netatalk) because Apple wouldn’t license AFP. Those devices would fail in the manner I described above because Netatalk could not manage the error checking required of TIme Machine.

You should use your Master’s degree to install on your router a version of Samba that supports the Time Machine over SMB specification. Then, you wouldn’t need to jump through hoops like you did to configure a backup that is not reliable.

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Time machine on Ventura no longer works with a network drive

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