Time Machine has it seen it's days

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Level 1

14 points

Time Machine has it seen it's days

It's been a while since Time Machine was release but i think over the years it has become more and more unstable and I think it's no completly unreliable.

I have started using Time Machine first with local attached disks. Everything was good but limited in space and accessibility. This was abandoned when I bought my second Mac and wanted to have consolidated backups.

Move on to a Time Capsule for 2 Macs which worked fine until the Time Capsule eventually died. Was a common problem back due to power supply dying. Even now using a Time Capsule with a maximum of 3TB is not an option for me.

Got onto a Synology NAS box which is great but now and then it would just wipe out a complete backup and start new. People are pointing fingers at Netatalk which is all NAS vendors implementation of AFP protocol used for doing the network based backups.

Eventually got myself a Mac Mini based OS X Server and setup Time Machine Server backup to local attached Firewire drive. Only option as disk space is limited inside the Mac Mini (max 2 x 2.5 drives). And guess what that also now fails by corrupting the backup files and wanting to start new, same as NAS.

So now I have kind of come to the end of the road. Despite of going back to connect a local disk to each and every Mac in my house there is no other reliable option to do a Time Machine backup. I got 5 Macs in my house now, 2 Macbooks that are floating around and not stationary. DAS is just no possible.

Not sure if I am missing something here but is there any other option I haven't tried?

Posted on Aug 24, 2012 4:49 PM

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Answer 1

petermac87

Level 5

7,447 points

Aug 24, 2012 5:09 PM in response to aschmid

Time Machine not missing a beat on my 5 Macs. Each has it's own B/U drive and each still performing full and uncorrupted backups. What will happen in future OSX is just speculation. In the meantime, I find no faults with TM at all and must say it has saved my skin a few times.

Cheers

Pete

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Answer 2

etresoft

Level 8

46,726 points

Aug 24, 2012 5:50 PM in response to aschmid

aschmid wrote:

Got onto a Synology NAS box which is great but now and then it would just wipe out a complete backup and start new. People are pointing fingers at Netatalk which is all NAS vendors implementation of AFP protocol used for doing the network based backups.

For good reason. Apple released an updated network authentication mechanism in 2002 but Netatalk and the NAS vendors apparently didn't use it. Apple finally disabled the old protocol and everybody says "What happened?" Netatalk has always been flaky and even other open source people don't like them.

So now I have kind of come to the end of the road. Despite of going back to connect a local disk to each and every Mac in my house there is no other reliable option to do a Time Machine backup. I got 5 Macs in my house now, 2 Macbooks that are floating around and not stationary. DAS is just no possible.

Not sure if I am missing something here but is there any other option I haven't tried?

There have got to be some NAS vendors who have made it to 2003. You can always buy a big RAID and install Mountain Lion server on one of the stationary machines as a Time Machine source. You can also share a local volume from the client version, but that is not officially supported.

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Answer 3

aschmid Author

Level 1

14 points

Aug 24, 2012 6:23 PM in response to etresoft

etresoft wrote:

aschmid wrote:

Got onto a Synology NAS box which is great but now and then it would just wipe out a complete backup and start new. People are pointing fingers at Netatalk which is all NAS vendors implementation of AFP protocol used for doing the network based backups.

For good reason. Apple released an updated network authentication mechanism in 2002 but Netatalk and the NAS vendors apparently didn't use it. Apple finally disabled the old protocol and everybody says "What happened?" Netatalk has always been flaky and even other open source people don't like them.

So now I have kind of come to the end of the road. Despite of going back to connect a local disk to each and every Mac in my house there is no other reliable option to do a Time Machine backup. I got 5 Macs in my house now, 2 Macbooks that are floating around and not stationary. DAS is just no possible.

Not sure if I am missing something here but is there any other option I haven't tried?

There have got to be some NAS vendors who have made it to 2003. You can always buy a big RAID and install Mountain Lion server on one of the stationary machines as a Time Machine source. You can also share a local volume from the client version, but that is not officially supported.

So you just convenintly skipped the part in between your two comment section where I said I tried Mountain Lion server and it failed to in order to advise me to get Mountain Lion server?

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Answer 4

etresoft

Level 8

46,726 points

Aug 25, 2012 6:08 AM in response to aschmid

That is the danger with ranting. If you slip in some useful information towards the end, it is likely to get missed. I suggest you start a new question in the Mountain Lion Server forum and expand that information. Forget about all the NAS and third party issues. No one here cares about those. If you can provide good detail about how you have setup your server and how you are connecting to it, I'm sure people will be able to help.

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