Apple Time Machine troubleshooting macOS 26.2 TN Scale

[flashdrive]

Links

Adding a Basic Time Machine SMB Share

Time Machine Setup

I have installe TrueNas Scale and trying to setup Time Machine for our home Macs but am really struggling. I have searched and search but can only find bits of information and they dont seem to work. I have checked the Truenas documents and reddit etc but cants seem to get it to work, can anyone give me any tips please? Cheers

Time Machine Auto Snapshot Weird Behavior

I have two TrueNAS systems both running Scale v25.10.1. I have a Time Machine dataset on each configured exactly the same on each system. The respective SMB shares are configured exactly the same on each as well. The strange thing is that the Auto Snapshot feature is not working as expected on one of the systems (System 2, below.) System 1: One user backing up two Macs, one running Sequoia and the other running Tahoe. For each, a TM backup is done daily. After each backup, TrueNAS automaticall…

TrueNas Scale Time Machine backup folder

I set up a folder for MacBook backups using the Time Machine application, with SMB and ACL permissions, the laptop connects to the TrueNas Scale server but the backup process ends with the message Time Machine cannot complete the backup on the timemachinedata disk, this is the name of the backup folder, TrueNas Scale ver.25.10.0.1, macTahoe 26.1, please provide an appropriate correction for TrueNas Scale ver.25.10.0.1.

German, same problem after fix of TN Scale

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[Sara]

Since there are already threads about the issue itself, is this some kind of meta discussion? Or about how updating to 25.10.1 does not solve it?

Unpopular opinion: Apple ditched AFP without having a good working replacement. SMB support from Apple is pretty bad and should not be used in production. Same goes for TimeMachine backups over SMB. It is wonky, and always has been. Even 10y ago we had discussions in Synology or QNAP forums, where TimeMachine all of a sudden wanted to start over, after 2 years of doing backups. Not much has changed since then. They only thing that did change is that you no longer need an external SSD but can also use an external HDD. In the beginning of APFS, there was a problem that grinded external HDDs to a halt.
If you still want to use TrueNAS, I would set it to at least sync disabled.

[flashdrive]

Hi @Sara

thank you for sharing.

For me one of the problems seems to be that the original usecase with Time Capsule went EOL. Yes, single point of failure with 1 disk only.

For me this thread is the collection of posts.

Question:

Is there an “easy to use” alternative to Time Machine, which does work reliably with SMB?

5 Macs to back-up I have…

edit:

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Duplicati

[Pross]

Ive never had an issue with timemachine over smb.

I have 2 macos machines that backup to 1 1TB ssd in truenas, then once a week that dataset gets backed up to a spinning dataset. Its been running for a long time.

Laptop is Ventura 13.7.8 and the main machine is 26.4.1

tm dataset is just set up as a regular Tme Machine Share. Nothing special nothing fancy, just works.

[Sara]

@flashdrive

Is there an “easy to use” alternative to Time Machine, which does work reliably with SMB?

Some people swear on carbon copy cloner. I never used it.
I don’t need to backup macOS or Windows anymore, thanks to Nextcloud. I have one mac which only has TimeMachine to a 2,5" SSD. Mostly so I have a iCloud backup.