Time Machine/Server Question

Time Machine Server has not been removed. It has just been moved. (And well hidden) Do the following:

1: Open System Preferences > Sharing

2: Define the shared folder that will be (or already is) your TM folder

3: Right click on the folder in the Shared Folders list (or hold down the Control key and click on the folder) to get the contextual menu

4: Choose Advanced Options...

5: Check the box "Share as a Time Machine backup destination" and optionally define a limit

That should get you back and operational.

But, and this is a little fuzzy right now, you might need to reconfigure the clients. (We are all figuring this out). If your server has an SSD drive, it converted to APFS. If your TM share is on the boot volume, then it is now only available over SMB. If your clients are configured for AFP, you will need to update your clients. If your TM share is on an external volume than you should be fine as external volumes should not convert to APFS.

Hope this helps

Reid

Apple Consultants Network

Author - "El Capitan Server – Foundation Services"

Author - "El Capitan Server – Control & Collaboration"

Author - "El Capitan Server – Advanced Services"

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Hello, i can't connect our clients to the new Time Machine Server.

I added a user with Server App, but when i try to connect this user to the Time-Machine-Server backup Volume, connection is refused. The windows switches back to the Volume select Window.

User-Backups to our Time Machine Server are working now. I added several user accounts, granted access rights and then transferred the user rights to the Time Machine Server Volume.

Now we have another issue: obviously, users should not have access to other users Backups. For that reason i had to remove all other users from each individual Time Machine sparsebundles (on the second image you can see only 2 sparsebundles because i tested with 2 users first).

I did not yet find a simple way to gain access rights for the Time Machine Server Volume.

I have reconfigured all as described above, plus eliminated AFP from all sharing - now 100% SMB. All my Macs have successfully resumed Time Machine backups to the central macOS Server Mac. One note about this, if the remote machine backup (via Time Machine) used AFP, then one needs to go into Time Machine Preferences, remove the AFP drive and re-connect using SMB (i.e. same drive, different protocol).

Now back to the original question. Server used to present a window that showed all the remote Macs backup history as to when last backed up. That was useful to scan to see which Macs might be having a back-up issue. That central report seems to be missing, or really, really well hidden.

I managed to get access to the Time Machine Server Volume by adding access rights via Server App. The macos Server app seems to go bananas.

******

Don't have an answer to the Time Machine issue (yet) but recommend these tutorials:

MacOS Server 5 Part 1: Server Upgrade - YouTube

I miss the overview backup screen too. Anybody worked out where it is?