[simondotau]

Time Machine backups on remote drives do live inside an Apple file system. They are stored as a mutable disk image.

The critical setting for reliability is to use AFP and not SMB. To this end I have two Synology NAS devices—a multi drive unit shared as SMB for general use and a single drive unit shared as AFP for Time Machine. While I do have occasional backup trees go bad (once every two or three years) the backups themselves are still fine and so I just start a fresh one.

[jbverschoor]

That's not what Apple recommends. Time Machine is pretty shit these days. With their cloud/services strategy, it simply get abandoned. I use time machine, but I don't trust it, so I have other solutions as well

[simondotau]

It doesn't matter what Apple recommends—the recommendations are just dead wrong. AFP works and SMB does not. I religiously check backups and I know they are working.

[vatrikpolker]

Slackware is actually the one distro I've succeeded deeply with AFS. One thing that made everything less buggy is to find out what your UID , User ID, was, on the OSX UNIX-compatible system e.g. 1001, let's say, and just make sure the co-responging AFS user/share on the other end shared the same. - No bugged idea why it matters but within linux' AFS implementation paired with OS X it seems to be crucial for some reason, and a lot less headaches.

So therefore: user ' osxking ' with UID ' 1001 ' connects best to user ' osxking ' UID ' 1001 ' on your Slackware AFS server. Good luck man! It will work! < 3 Happy AFS'ing, Slackware served me well!

[tonyedgecombe]

SMB has been rock solid for me, I haven't had a TM corruption in all the time I've been using it.

[simondotau]

You are lucky. I've had occasional TM corruptions with SMB, AFP and local USB drives. Seems to be around one annually across five machines.

I've just checked my backups and based on the date stamps on .backupbundle packages, my last corruption via AFP was October 2019.

[jbverschoor]

For me after a while it simply fails to finish a backup. It's horrible.

[CharlesW]

> The critical setting for reliability is to use AFP and not SMB.

I've been using Time Machine with a QNAP SMB target (for as long as Time Machine has supported SMB) without problems. Reading this thread makes me wonder if the problem is actually Synology NASs.

[op00to]

THIS. AFP not SMB.

[Jnr]

We tried it with AFP as well, did not help, after some time those time machine backups got corrupted.

We suspected that maybe AFP writes failed because computers were disconnected from network before buffer was written to the server. But there are no visual indicators for that and we did not want to debug it. We just switched to 3rd party backup solution.