Time Machine via SMB vs AFP on Synology's DSM 6.1

John Galt's reply is neither absolutely accurate nor absolutely inaccurate.

The original Time Machine feature supported using either a local HFS+ formatted hard drive or a genuine Apple Mac running Server.app and acting as a Time Machine Server, or an Apple Time Capsule also acting as a Time Machine Server. The later two options i.e. Time Machine Servers required using an AFP network share.

Most NAS makers use an open source program called Netatalk to provide their AFP service and the Netatalk team have also added the ability for it to act as a Time Machine Server. However where John Galt is correct is that Netatalk have done this via much guesswork as to what Apple are doing and Apple also have a nasty habit of moving the goal posts each time they update the Mac operating system. Therefore Netatalk cannot be guaranteed to be 100% compatible. Worse still the NAS makers may not have the latest version of Netatalk in their products. Despite this Time Machine over AFP to a NAS works well enough for many people.

On the topic of backups you should always test they can be successfully used to do a restoration and should consider having two different backup systems e.g. a clone as well as a Time Machine backup.

Where John Galt is however being overly pessimistic is that Apple do not forbid NAS makers from providing Time Machine capability and for most people it has historically been 'adequate'. Furthermore in more recent times Apple have actually been more forthcoming and supportive of the efforts of NAS makers to do this. Read-on…

As you have been trying it is now possible in theory to do Time Machine backups to a Time Machine Server via SMB instead of AFP. This is officially supported using Apple's Server.app but not officially supported on a Time Capsule.

NAS makers use another different open source program called SAMBA to implement SMB support and the SAMBA team have been working on incorporating the official requirements published by Apple on how to do this. See https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/NetworkingInternetWeb/T ime_Machine_SMB_Spec/

However as far as I can tell the SAMBA team have not yet finished this work and therefore even if a NAS maker has included the very latest version of SAMBA it will not yet have the required changes. As a result SAMBA is not yet going to have solved any issues still remaining. See https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12380

So the current situation is that Time Machine over AFP to a NAS is in general possible and in many peoples experience 'works'. Time Machine over SMB to a NAS however is an unknown entity and very likely to still have issues and I would therefore even myself not yet rely on it.

I didn't run into an issue until updating to High Sierra...

Prepare your institution for iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, or macOS Server 5.4

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207828

"...AFP can’t share files on Apple File System (APFS)."

"...If you need to share files, switch to SMB."

I needed to disable AFP in File Services > SMB/AFP/NFS in DiskStation Manager so that only SMB file service is used to connect between macOS and DSM. (I had SMB enabled already, but of course this now needs to be turned on if not.)

I then also needed to disable AFP and instead enable SMB for Bonjour service discovery of DSM File Services > Advanced > Bonjour.

For me, this resulted in also needing to re-log-in to my DiskStation via macOS Finder in order to access the NAS as I had been doing in Finder, as well as re-select the "Time Machine" shared folder on the NAS from within Time Machine to direct it to use the shared folder as the backup destination. I was able to use the existing backup without issue as opposed to needing to remove my previous backups.

Well, none of us can know if Apple has taken poetic license with Time Machine, and changed something in it, or how macOS Sierra addresses the auto-negotiation for SMB3.

There may be useful performance tuning info for you in this article. Check if client signing is on for the SMB3 connection between the Synology and your Mac.

Hi Michael,

found this topic due to having a similar problem. I'm quite sure I can't help you, but maybe you can : I'm trying to move Time Machine from AFP to SMB 3, but I don't know how to do so. If you have any tips, they'd be more than welcome :-)

Hi,

I am thinking as well switching from AFP to SMB with a Synology NAS.

There is one question: Does Time Machine remember the backups on my

NAS after disabling AFP and enabling SMB?

Thx for any reply.

Frank

With respect, the statement non-Apple NAS devices are unsuitable for use with TM ist nonsense. I do TM backups since it's first release on various NAS devices from different vendors, never had a problem.

starbug wrote:

With respect, the statement non-Apple NAS devices are unsuitable for use with TM ist nonsense. I do TM backups since it's first release on various NAS devices from different vendors, never had a problem.

Great! That means when your unsupported Time Machine implementation fails, you won't be adding to the hundreds of reports that already exist on this site.

This Synology's KB helped me. DiskStation Manager - Knowledge Base | Synology Inc.I'm running on SMB3 on macOS High Sierra. I've disabled AFP on my NAS.

I did something different. Instead of setting up TimeMachine user with a quota, I set a folder with a quota.

Non-Apple NAS devices are unsuitable for use with Apple's Time Machine. To learn how to use Time Machine please read Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac - Apple Support.