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Losing backups with Synology DS1511+ and Time Machine

S

SlugBlanket

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 5, 2011
130
7
I bought the above NAS in October of last year and it seemed to work fine with Time Machine. However since December of last year I'm regularly getting the following message (attached). I'm using Lion 10.7.3 and Synology DSM 3.2-1955. All connections during backup are through Gigabit ethernet. The Time Machine volume on the NAS resides on 2 Disks formatted to SHR with no other use. The physical disks are compatible with the NAS.

I logged a ticket with Synology with a data dump of the NAS for them to look at but they came back to me saying that it is a known issue with Macs and that I should try and use Disk Utility to fix the available backups.

This was a non-starter so I was wondering if anyone else has had similar issues recently and if they had a better solution.

Alternatively can anyone recommend a backup solution other than Time Machine that works with a NAS ?
 

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Have you tried Disk utility to fix the backup ?

I also found there are some odd behaviours with Time Machine on Synology. I had the same warning than you and selected "start new backup" option, but Time machine did use the old one instead.

There are other soft available for backup: arrsync, superduper, carbon copy cloner.
 
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Alas, Time Machine backup to a NAS or a HD connected to an Airport Extreme is not officially supported by Apple.
 
I've had the same problem! Apple may say Time Machine is not supported on NAS but Synology says it supports it. I wouldn't have bought the NAS otherwise. I think Synology needs to make it work or refund us Time Machine users. BTW, it fails every now and then on both Lion and Snow Leopard.
 
My honeymoon with Synology is not ending well.

First I have a lot of USB compatibility issues for Backup, and now a Time Machine that I don't trust anymore...
 
I've used a DS110j and currently a DS212j with a handful of Macs and have had zero problems with TM. If it was hypercritical you could have the NAS run its own Time Machine style backup on your backup image.
 
I've got an external USB drive attached formatted to ext4. I'm also mucking about with the 4.0 beta recently.

I don't use the SHR format.
 
blueroom said:
I've got an external USB drive attached formatted to ext4. I'm also mucking about with the 4.0 beta recently.

I don't use the SHR format.
Click to expand...

Same here, USB drives are ext4, no RAID, but no luck. And I am far from the only one according to Synology forums.

The worst is that if Synology were to commercialize an USB enclosure compatible with its own products I would gladly buy it, be cause I really like my DS212j.
 
Follow these directions:

http://furrybeard.com/blog/tech/err...ime-machine-must-create-a-new-backup-for-you/

It worked for me. Then I changed the destination of my Time Machine back-up to an HFS+ external drive connected to my Mac. It's not a question of "if" this error is going to occur again, the question is "when" and "when" this occurs again, the fix may not work so nicely. I couldn't take the chance of this happening, so I re-delegated Time Machine back-ups elsewhere.
 
As stated previously, Apple doesn't support TimeMachine over NAS.

Did you try to mount your sparsefile from the Synology and run Disk Utility (Disk Check/Repair) against it? Also make sure that DSM is up-to-date as they did just release a new update (that had some TimeMachine fixes included).

I also noticed that when my TimeMachine sparsefile got to be about 1-year deep and several hundred GB, I had to create a new sparse file.

While the above works, there seems to be no way to bridge those sparsefiles with TimeMachine (without some effort) to complete a recovery. Since then, I (like many) switched to CarbonCopyCloner and it appears to be backing-up happily to an encrypted sparsefile on my DS1511+ without fail.
 
TheRocketmac said:
As stated previously, Apple doesn't support TimeMachine over NAS.

Did you try to mount your sparsefile from the Synology and run Disk Utility (Disk Check/Repair) against it? Also make sure that DSM is up-to-date as they did just release a new update (that had some TimeMachine fixes included).

I also noticed that when my TimeMachine sparsefile got to be about 1-year deep and several hundred GB, I had to create a new sparse file.

While the above works, there seems to be no way to bridge those sparsefiles with TimeMachine (without some effort) to complete a recovery. Since then, I (like many) switched to CarbonCopyCloner and it appears to be backing-up happily to an encrypted sparsefile on my DS1511+ without fail.
Click to expand...

I didn't try to repair the sparsefile as I have had this error several times now even after accepting and starting from scratch each time. I had hoped that I was doing something stupid rather than it being an incompatibility issue. I have all of my important stuff directly on the NAS as it is all media shared between family members but I wanted system backups of the Mac to be reliable in case of drive failure etc. Re-customising the Mac from scratch would be a pain.

At present I'm just backing up my wife's MacBookPro but when I get my own iMac or MacPro and start really getting to work on my projects, I want a solution that I have confidence in.

I'm going to try CCC; a working solution that's perhaps not so user-friendly is far better than a user-friendly solution that is as problematic as Time Machine.

Thanks to all who responded.
 
SlugBlanket said:
I didn't try to repair the sparsefile as I have had this error several times now even after accepting and starting from scratch each time. I had hoped that I was doing something stupid rather than it being an incompatibility issue. I have all of my important stuff directly on the NAS as it is all media shared between family members but I wanted system backups of the Mac to be reliable in case of drive failure etc. Re-customising the Mac from scratch would be a pain.

At present I'm just backing up my wife's MacBookPro but when I get my own iMac or MacPro and start really getting to work on my projects, I want a solution that I have confidence in.

I'm going to try CCC; a working solution that's perhaps not so user-friendly is far better than a user-friendly solution that is as problematic as Time Machine.

Thanks to all who responded.
Click to expand...

Have you changed your plist file? It is going to keep giving you an error message until you manually change this plist file:

com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist

I posted instructions on how to do this in my link above.
 
Food for thought.

Are your HDDs on the Synology recommended list, are there known incompatibilities?
Some HDDs have firmware updates, might be worth checking into.
 
SlugBlanket said:
I didn't try to repair the sparsefile as I have had this error several times now even after accepting and starting from scratch each time. I had hoped that I was doing something stupid rather than it being an incompatibility issue. I have all of my important stuff directly on the NAS as it is all media shared between family members but I wanted system backups of the Mac to be reliable in case of drive failure etc. Re-customising the Mac from scratch would be a pain.

At present I'm just backing up my wife's MacBookPro but when I get my own iMac or MacPro and start really getting to work on my projects, I want a solution that I have confidence in.

I'm going to try CCC; a working solution that's perhaps not so user-friendly is far better than a user-friendly solution that is as problematic as Time Machine.

Thanks to all who responded.
Click to expand...


Another thought is to use something like Clonezilla to create a 1-off system backup of the boot drive/system drive every so often. I do that with all my Macs, PC's and Linux machines. it's makes recover a bit faster, then restore everything else from backup.
 
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