EDIT: SOLVED!!! Thanks to those that commented!!

I had my TimeMachine working for backup to my NAS (DS920+). That stopped working sometime last year. I read that further updates to macOS fixed that, but I upgraded to Ventura last night and it's still not able to back up to my NAS. I have TM configured to use the NAS and it's authenticated with an account that has r/w access to the TM folder but it just won't complete. I'm seeking any insight the braintrust may have.

I'm not sure if this is a macos issue or synology one, but just wanted to check if anyone else had the same problem.

Prior to updating to Sequoia, I followed this tutorial on setting up my mac to backup to my nas using time machine. It worked fine, the only issue was that I'd occasionally get notifications from my nas about exceeding the number of logins, which was my mac trying to backup. I'm still not sure why I was getting the warnings, but it would work in the end.

Since upgrading to Sequoia I get the same warnings, log center is showing that my mac has accessed the shared folder that I set up for time machine, but then my mac says backup failed and "The network disk disconnected from your mac while backing up".

I followed the steps in the video again from scratch and deleted the old backups but no luck. There is more than enough free space and the nas and mac are on the same network.

Has anyone had a similar issue and been able to solve it? Thank you.

edit: Thanks to u/s_p_lee for pointing out that it seems to be a known issue and turning the firewall fixes it. Not a permanent solution, but hopefully it's an easy fix for apple to make.

FIX: It looks like it has been fixed in Sequoia 15.1.

TM with my Synology NAS worked flawlessly until I upgraded to Ventura. I tried the troubleshooting steps outlined in this Synology support article. I also tried upgrading the NAS software as well as disable + re-enabling SMB. None of these approaches fixed the problem. Has anyone else seen this issue and found a solution?

Hi,

I use Time Machine - I have Sonoma - with a Synology NAS.

Unfortunately it work unreliable. Sometimes it works for two weeks without a problem then suddenly I get the red exclamation mark. - When I start a backup manually, it takes a long time at the "Preparing backup" stage. To get it working again, I delete the Time Machine Folder on the Synology NAS and the backup target in Time Machine - Then it works again.

But I don't want to do that every month or so.

Bonjour broadcast is on for SMB only.

Any setting to change on the Synology NAS?

Hey all,

I usually run Time Machine over the network with an UNRAID server.

On this beta of Tahoe at least, it doesn't seem too happy / always says an issue.

Using a local SSD works fine... but anyone else use network?

I have a synology nas, and we are a mac household. For a while we were able to use time machine with no problem backing up to the nas, but it suddenly stopped working. I've followed every tutorial I can find, with no luck.

I've got the shared drive set up, and the macs can see the drives on the network, but when time machine trys to connect to the share, it just hangs on "preparing backup" and show Zero KB available.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Are their other good backup solutions for mac?

Hi guys,

I have DS213+ (DSM 6.2.4-25556 Update 6) running as Time Machine backup for multiple Mac for years. Macs are on macOS BigSur 11.7.1

Previously running on AFP only for as long as I can remember without problem.

Tried AFP only, SMB only, both AFP & SMB.
Setting up with TimeMachine with any of the above settings are ok but it can never complete first backup.

First backup was never completed. I can see from console that the process backupd gives error "Runtime corruption check not completed - the backup disk could not be found"

Tried different network cable and ports. No improvement. 2x 6TB HDD in SH1 in NAS are all healthy. I can copy files between Mac and NAS. Files seem intact.

Any recommendations?

I'm trying to do a Time Machine backup however, it keeps failing - "Time Machine couldn't back up to "192.168.0.35". Any ideas on how to resolve this? This happened previously and I basically just disabled/enabled Time Machine however after the first backup, it appears as though Time Machine can't do another back up.

I created a Shared Folder titled TimeMachine on my NAS with its own account. I connect to it using Finder on my Mac - Go -> Connect to Server -> smb://TimeMachine:*@192.168.0.35 and enter the password for my user. I can see it mounted on my desktop.

I've been using a Synology 918+ to backup my macs for about 8 years. My 10 year old imac finally died at christmas. My wife authorized the purchase of a new mac studio that will also hopefully last 10 years. (hehe) My wife recently gave me her old laptop which I successfully restored from a backup of my old laptop about 3 months ago so I know the synology backup functions are working. My problem starts when I try to restore from an old imac backup to update the new mac studio. I have tried using migration assistant and booting into the option screen. I can get to the folder with the backups in them but when I do all the disk images say "Mount Failed." Any ideas? I am going to try to figure out how to cross post this in mac, too. I got on the phone with Apple and the level 2 guy I talked to had never evern heard of Synology and was not familiar with the term "NAS." It was an eye opener.

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I've been doing Time Machine backups to my Synology devices (first a 418play and now a 1819+) but I find myself running into issues every few months. Sometimes it's macOS updates that break it, sometimes it breaks for seemingly random reasons. I can sometimes fix it, but often I have to start a fresh TM backup from scratch. It's beginning to get quite irritating.

For some reason now, my TM hasn't backed up in the past 3 days. It can see the drive, when I say "backup now" it says looking for drive, then preparing backup, and then it just stops and resets to "last backup december 20th". The only changes I've made to my Synology in the last few days was setting up some docker containers for sabNZBD and sonarr, but I've since powered those off, restarted the NAS, and I'm still facing the same issue.

At a certain point, have any of you decided to give up on getting Time Machine to work with a Synology NAS? For those of you who have, what did you end up doing? I feel like having to remember to plugin an external drive regularly for backups is tedious. I'm considering getting a Mac Mini and having a DAS hooked up there and running TM backups through that. What are the best practices and seamless, reliable options for this?

Hi guys, I am trying to chase down some proven instructions on how to correctly set up time machine on a Synology NAS. I have tried a few times now however I must be doing something incorrectly as time machine seems to back up but when it is complete it says last backed up: never. And then I cannot see previous back ups? Considering that initial backup takes quite a while it’s pretty frustrating having to start again each time when it is not working. Thanks.

I recently purchased a DS220+ to replace my WD My Cloud EX2. I setup Time Machine backup following this page: https://kb.synology.com/en-af/DSM/tutorial/How_to_back_up_files_from_Mac_to_Synology_NAS_with_Time_Machine. However, after upgrading to DSM 7.2.1-69057 Update 3, I am getting a warning that Apple doesn't support AFP anymore (https://kb.synology.com/en-af/DSM/tutorial/file_protocol_AFP_not_recommended). Searching this subreddit, I see posts more than a year old on this topic. So, if I am to disable AFP, will Time Machine backup stop working? I am on Sonoma 14.2 on both my macs.

EDIT: It appears this may not be a Synology issue, I'm now seeing the same behaviour trying to make a Time Machine backup to a freshly-formatted local USB disk.

I just bought a DS220j in part to replace my dying Apple Airport Extreme, which I was using for Time Machine backups from my MacBook Pro (10.14.6). So far, I've been unable to complete a single TM backup to the Synology.

The backup always stops after backing up only a few tens or hundreds of megabytes, usually with no errors in the Time Machine preferences pane or in the Console, but very occasionally with a "Could not complete backup" notification.

I've tried doing a new backup from scratch, and I've tried seeding a backup from my last good sparsebundle file on my previous backup disk (after fsck-ing it for errors). I've tried over SMB, and I've tried over AFP (which I've now turned off again, as I know it's not recommended).

Currently, I'm running a cron job on my Mac that runs 'tmutil startbackup' every 5 minutes. This is my second attempt at that—the first time, it nearly got to the end after a couple of days, but then the "amount remaining to backup" just kept increasing faster than it was backing up, so that backup never finished either. (I don't think that's a Synology problem, though—seems to be a known issue when using TM with a NAS, which I don't know how to fix either.)

Can anyone suggest anything to make this less painful, and preferably, Just Work?

So I've been trying to set up Time Machine for 4 days now and I can't get it working reliably.
I get either:

1. Can't connect to a resource error

2. Time out errors

3. A full first backup but incremental ones fail 90% of the time

4. SMB mount errors

5. Corruption errors

6. A million retries needed to get the initial backup created

I've followed the official tutorial every time, I've even tried 3rd party tutorials and suggestions.

The current NAS setup is:
• SMB
• AFP completely turned off
• Time Machine user with full access to the shared folder, with a set quota

Hi there-

I would love some help from the Synology gurus. I installed an RS816 about a year ago, and it has been working great. Up until this fall, I was happily able to use it with four different Macs in the house as a Time Machine target. Unfortunately, somewhere between the last few updates to the Synology, and updating to Mac High Sierra 10.13 (which requires Time Machine over SMB) I've had no luck. The Bonjour broadcast works well, and the volume does appear in the Time Machine list of drives, but when I select it to start backing up I get the error message: "The selected network backup disk does not support the required capabilities. Please choose a different network backup disk." Thoughts? Any help is super appreciated! Thanks!