Time Machine broken for months (still)

TrueNAS General
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What can I do here? I’m at my wit’s end. Months ago TrueNAS upgrades have broken Time Machine for me.

Every time I look at it, everything looks correct. I’ve tried recreating datasets, recreating SMB shares, recreating all kinds of stuff, zero change. I have no clue why my mac can no longer see Time Machine shares on TrueNAS. (and I’m on latest 25.10.5, no change). Everything’s been restarted top to bottom. All the settings look right / according to guides, shows fruit: time machine etc, mac can see other mDNS activity np…

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I was in your situation. The solution is IMHO pretty simple. Accept that Apple dropped AFP support, said everyone to move to SMB but did not bother to support SMB properly. You are not supposed to have local data you want to backup, you should use cloud services instead. You and I as “traditional or old school users” are not their priority. And TimeMachine never really worked properly even over AFP. Even there after two years you got the popup that it has to start over.

Given that situation, how likely is it that Apple will fix it? There are rumors of iCloud TimeMachine, if anything changes, this is the direction TimeMachine is heading IMHO.

So I moved on to USB drives formatted with APFS. It is a shame that it does not work on a snapshot basis, since both source and destination are CoW, but at least it workes flawlessly. Old 2.5" HDD also worked, but the noise started bothering me.

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I have been in this boat too.

For the time being, Time Machine is working beautifully on TrueNAS and yet I know it’s entirely possibly an archive will corrupt tomorrow and the sparesebundle will have to be rebuilt.

I also have Time Machine running on a Pi for the kids and that repository is positively unreliable by comparison. I’m rebuilding it from the ground up as I type and I’m pretty certain the Pi had no external worries.

I’m with @Sara that Apple has not covered itself in glory re: documenting Time Machine (or APFS). My suggestion would be to contact @awalkerix and see what he can do for you.

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4

I understand your concerns.

I have experienced similar issues and discontinued using Time Machine several years ago. A solution that has proven effective for me is to use Syncthing on all my Macs paired with a Docker container on TrueNAS. I have separate datasets for each Mac. Syncthing’s ‘versions’ combined with ZFS snapshots can replicate the functionality of Time Machine. I use Syncthing to back up each Mac to TrueNAS automatically and each Mac has slightly different requirements or data to back up. I also back up my iCloud documents folders to TrueNAS. I have set the retention to 365 daily snapshots which is superior to the 30 days offered by iCloud’s deleted items. This solution has been successful for me and I have not looked back. I wish you the best.

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That implementation with Syncthing looks like a great alternative. I had no idea one could docker like that. Does it provide a secure sandbox?

The reason I ask is that I’d like to ditch the Pi for my kids altogether but I also want to keep any of their kreepy crawlies off my NAS proper. If the docker container is considered secure and I can host the data via a dedicated NIC on the kids VLAN, then that might be good enough for me.

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Time machine is working in internal testing and my at-home testing. The only way progress can be made is if you file a bug report with full debug (but note that it may take some time to get to your particular case since we tend to have pretty high community ticket load with various things). That said, if you file a bug report make sure you test against non-EOL MacOS and have applied available updates.

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Containers can be reasonably secure, particularly when built with security as a priority from the outset.

Below are portions of my Syncthing compose file. Key measures include running the container as a non-root user, adding the security_opt directive, and applying cap_drop statements to limit capabilities. It’s also worth considering how much trust you place in the Syncthing maintainers — the project is open source, so the code is available for anyone to review. Ultimately, each person should evaluate their own risk tolerance and decide which security options to enable accordingly. That said, this setup has been rock solid for me for several years. It’s one solution to an unreliable Time Machine backup.

user: 3000:3000 # UID:GID from run_as

environment:

  - PUID=3000

  - PGID=3000

  # you can add extra environment variables if needed

volumes:

  - /mnt/titan/encrypted/home/nihil2040/Sync/config:/var/syncthing/config

  - /mnt/titan/encrypted/home/nihil2040/Sync/data/:/data

security_opt:

  - no-new-privileges:true

cap_drop:

  - ALL
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