The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups? It's so fragile you can't rely on it. It's gotten better in recent years, possibly due to APFS, but that just means somewhat longer intervals between disasters (wipe out and reinitialize, losing all your backups). A T.M. using a custom protocol to save and restore blocks would fail sometimes too, but not ruin all your existing backups.
edit: I use Arq for daily backups, but T.M. for hourly. When T.M. eventually craters its storage, I have robust dailies in the cloud, so no worries.
I'm a big fan of SuperDuper [1]. I use it for daily differential backups to a secondary SSD. I don't get the hourly backups that TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable in the event that my system disk dies.
I'm sure you could do the same with cron and rsync, but I can't be bothered.
This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.
I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.
You can just use the UI to make whatever schedule you want (monthly, daily, every Monday, etc.). I think it edits your crontab behind the scenes. I set it to daily, but you could set whatever you want. You can even have multiple schedule entries, similar to cron.
Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.
If you set Time Machine to use encrypted backups, it will create a fake disk that's really a directory tree with a bunch of gigabyte-sized binary chunks. This is safer because it doesn't require the file system to support anything fancy like symlinks or case-insensitive unicode file names. One downside is that restoring to anything other than a Mac is nontrivial.
Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?) but it's not really useable. It pretends that backups-over-the-network are a possibility but its completely unstable over the network and invariably decides the backup is corrupt after a few months and then tells you you have to start from scratch.
On the extremely rare occasion I have to replace my laptop, I literally just point it to the backup on the network with the cable plugged in, and an hour later it's "my laptop" again.
Time Machine has always been a bit ropey on SMB shares. I think it’s in part because it creates a disk image on the share then writes to that. This creates a lot more work and potential for things to go wrong.
If you want to backup across the network then it’s probably best to choose some third party software.
I have been trying to trouble shoot a Time Machine issue since upgrading to Tahoe. It is usb backup. So far none of the most recent stated fixes work.
An initial backup on newly formatted disk will run but very slowly. Perhaps reaching 100% but it never finishes. At some point the percentage will change and the backup will stay stuck at somewhere near 10%. Cancel backup and run it again. Gets to ~10% and stays stuck. Multiple drives. Re-fs'ed. Boot into safe mode. Networking off. Etc, etc. etc. The TimeMachineMechanic app doesn't have any revealing feedback. I can run a full tar backup to the same disks.
No idea.
I haven't tried backing up to a network share but really, it shouldn't be this difficult.
Clearly someone didn't test a bunch of edge cases when pushing this one out.
If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces the chance of accidentally upgrading.
I agree - I am running my own Samba server and I don't think I'm affected, but it isn't really clear to me how to double check or why Apple's new default broke things in the first place
I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.
I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted. My SMB settings in Synology were set to what the recommended settings were already. Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology.
However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them.
Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can check on your backups. Even if it's just a quick test of a restored file or folders.
> Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network
I don’t understand why people think this is complicated or limited only to highly technical people.
NAS units are popular with consumers now, not just tech people. They buy them with drives installed and they come with instructions to set up backups with Windows and Mac.
I get what you're saying. I will only quibble that the consumers in the market for a NAS, regardless of ease-of-setup, is still bordering technically inclined. My mother-in-law has enough trouble with her iPhone, let alone a server-type-device that she needs to administer.
I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.
My impression is that companies like Backblaze and other backup-as-a-service solutions are more consumer-popular because it externalizes the complexity and pitfalls like the author is experiencing.
To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole point of using Synology instead of alternatives that require more technical expertise, that aren't designed for Time Machine support straight out of the box.
Time Machine is for the everyday person. The everyday person doesn’t have a few thousand dollars to buy a second machine just to properly test a full restore backup periodically.
I don't have a second machine to do a full restore. I just do spot checks every month to see if I'm able to restore files from various locations. It's not scientific, but it's helpful to know if a spot check fails, that there may be a larger issue.
Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.
They don’t cost that much. And there are cheaper options.
Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.
So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?
That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.
If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.
Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restoration.
> Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
I'd argue that's not even the main problem. If it just broke and gave you error on each run ("this SMB share is incompatible") it wouldn't be an issue
I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.
The last straw is that Finder's scroll bars are broken in Tahoe. I put up with it until I hit an emergency at work and was working as fast as I could (each minute mattered), Tahoe was slowing me down. Tahoe didn't pass the pressure test.
Avoid it as long as possible. Mail search is broken 4 out of 5 days that I attempt a search, and I need to go to the webmail versions of my accounts to find anything. Fortunately it's only something I need to do about once a day, unlike in prior lives, but holy crap they took the best ruing about macOS and kids destroyed jt completely.
Plasma on Linux is looking pretty tempting these days, especially with almost all office software being web based these days.
Switching email clients is a big lift that I need to investigate, and have been hesitant to jump into until absolutely necessary, but another week of this BS...
Apple has broken Time Machine enough times that I would never consider using it at all anymore. Once upon a time, it was really neat, had great integration with Mac OS X, and an amazing user interface and experience, but it's now clearly technology that Apple will probably eventually drop entirely in favor of something less impressive all together, like telling you to buy more iCloud Storage.
Hasn't the issues always been related to remote Time Machine? I have a usb drive I use and haven't heard of any issues with that setup. Am I missing something?
I lose my Time Machine drive, like, every year or two.
Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it and start anew.
Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.
99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.
Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.
My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so its not that big of a deal for her.
In the past, I've heard recommendations not to use remote Time Machine over SMB directly, but rather to create an APFS disk image on a remote server and then backup to that as if its an external hard drive.
Supposedly, doing that eliminates a lot of the flakiness specific to SMB Time Machine, and while I haven't tested it personally, I have used disk images over SMB on macOS Tahoe recently, and they actually work great (other than the normal underlying annoyances of SMB that everyone with a NAS is mostly used to at this point).
The new ASIF format for disk images added in Tahoe actually works very well for this sort of thing, and gives you the benefits of sparse bundle disk images without requiring specific support for them on the underlying file system.[1][2] As long as you're on a file system that supports sparse files (I think pretty much every currently used file system except FAT32, exFAT, and very old implementations of HFS+), you get almost native performance out of the disk image now. (Although, again, that's just fixing the disk image overhead, you still have to work around the usual SMB weirdness unless you can get another remote file system protocol working.)
The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups? It's so fragile you can't rely on it. It's gotten better in recent years, possibly due to APFS, but that just means somewhat longer intervals between disasters (wipe out and reinitialize, losing all your backups). A T.M. using a custom protocol to save and restore blocks would fail sometimes too, but not ruin all your existing backups.
edit: I use Arq for daily backups, but T.M. for hourly. When T.M. eventually craters its storage, I have robust dailies in the cloud, so no worries.
> The bigger question is why does Time Machine continue use a network file system for backups?
The problem is them fucking up. Every other popular backup solution that does it does it just fine. And doesn't hide failures silently
I'm a big fan of SuperDuper [1]. I use it for daily differential backups to a secondary SSD. I don't get the hourly backups that TimeMachine has, but my SuperDuper backups are directly bootable in the event that my system disk dies.
I'm sure you could do the same with cron and rsync, but I can't be bothered.
[1] https://shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.ht...
This has been on my to-buy list for a while. Something I should probably do, because while recovery from the built-in recovery interface is fine, having an offline bootable backup is also great. It also doesn't interfere with having Time Machine be the "standard" backup.
I could probably setup a calendar appointment to dump a bootable image once a month to an external disk.
You can just use the UI to make whatever schedule you want (monthly, daily, every Monday, etc.). I think it edits your crontab behind the scenes. I set it to daily, but you could set whatever you want. You can even have multiple schedule entries, similar to cron.
Edit: Yeah, the bootable backups have saved me more than once. It's great to just be able to keep working even when the system disk is kaput.
If you set Time Machine to use encrypted backups, it will create a fake disk that's really a directory tree with a bunch of gigabyte-sized binary chunks. This is safer because it doesn't require the file system to support anything fancy like symlinks or case-insensitive unicode file names. One downside is that restoring to anything other than a Mac is nontrivial.
Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?) but it's not really useable. It pretends that backups-over-the-network are a possibility but its completely unstable over the network and invariably decides the backup is corrupt after a few months and then tells you you have to start from scratch.
> maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?
That's why I like it. Some of the visual flare is of course superfluous, but the timeline really is nice.
It's like git except it works without me having to think about it. (To be clear, git is much better, but I have to think about it.)
idk, works for me.
On the extremely rare occasion I have to replace my laptop, I literally just point it to the backup on the network with the cable plugged in, and an hour later it's "my laptop" again.
Time Machine has always been a bit ropey on SMB shares. I think it’s in part because it creates a disk image on the share then writes to that. This creates a lot more work and potential for things to go wrong.
If you want to backup across the network then it’s probably best to choose some third party software.
I have been trying to trouble shoot a Time Machine issue since upgrading to Tahoe. It is usb backup. So far none of the most recent stated fixes work.
An initial backup on newly formatted disk will run but very slowly. Perhaps reaching 100% but it never finishes. At some point the percentage will change and the backup will stay stuck at somewhere near 10%. Cancel backup and run it again. Gets to ~10% and stays stuck. Multiple drives. Re-fs'ed. Boot into safe mode. Networking off. Etc, etc. etc. The TimeMachineMechanic app doesn't have any revealing feedback. I can run a full tar backup to the same disks.
No idea.
I haven't tried backing up to a network share but really, it shouldn't be this difficult.
Clearly someone didn't test a bunch of edge cases when pushing this one out.
restic and kopia should work decently, if with a bit of setup, I think both can just mount backup as FUSE filesystem
The backup system that silently breaks when it doesn't like something in backend is not worth time
macOS yearly updates haven't been great since they started but Tahoe is a new low.
Apple really needs to turn things around.
If you set your Apple device to beta updates for the previous release you can suppress the constant prompts to upgrade. Reduces the chance of accidentally upgrading.
[delayed]
How do you do that?
The author posted a fix, but how do I check if there is a problem in the first place?
I agree - I am running my own Samba server and I don't think I'm affected, but it isn't really clear to me how to double check or why Apple's new default broke things in the first place
I would try to do some restores of random files. Kind of a "canary in the coal mine" test. If you have problems with restoring some files or folders, then you'll have a problem with doing larger restores.
I use the same setup and was able to restore some files I recently deleted. My SMB settings in Synology were set to what the recommended settings were already. Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
> Not sure what happened in this person's case, but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
Regardless he should've gotten alert if backup target is unusable, not silently break
> but it also seems like he backed up and didn't test the restores. Which isn't good practice.
For a professional devops person managing a custom backup solution, I agree.
For someone using mainstream consumer technology on a consumer laptop, it's not realistic to expect this. It needs to just work.
I'm not in devops. I don't even have a server aside from the basic usage I get out of my Synology.
However, I have lost data in my lifetime. If you value your backups, check on them.
Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network. Therefore, I feel it's not outside of the expectation that you can check on your backups. Even if it's just a quick test of a restored file or folders.
> Also, if you're the kind of person who has a Synology, it means you had to buy a NAS, drives, and setup all the associated machinery for Time Machine over your network
I don’t understand why people think this is complicated or limited only to highly technical people.
NAS units are popular with consumers now, not just tech people. They buy them with drives installed and they come with instructions to set up backups with Windows and Mac.
I get what you're saying. I will only quibble that the consumers in the market for a NAS, regardless of ease-of-setup, is still bordering technically inclined. My mother-in-law has enough trouble with her iPhone, let alone a server-type-device that she needs to administer.
I would imagine a more typical consumer would be buying a USB or Thunderbolt connected drive and following the prompts to set it up.
My impression is that companies like Backblaze and other backup-as-a-service solutions are more consumer-popular because it externalizes the complexity and pitfalls like the author is experiencing.
> For someone using consumer technology on a consumer laptop
Mounting an SMB share on a Synology NAS to use as a Time Machine backup target is not what most users would consider "consumer technology."
To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole point of using Synology instead of alternatives that require more technical expertise, that aren't designed for Time Machine support straight out of the box.
That’s definitely in the range of what consumers do these days.
The consumer NAS business is large. These are popular items with average consumers who understand the importance of backups.
It’s reasonable to expect it to work properly.
Time Machine is for the everyday person. The everyday person doesn’t have a few thousand dollars to buy a second machine just to properly test a full restore backup periodically.
I don't have a second machine to do a full restore. I just do spot checks every month to see if I'm able to restore files from various locations. It's not scientific, but it's helpful to know if a spot check fails, that there may be a larger issue.
Time Machine is absolutely for the layman, and something I feel can be improved upon with a bit more visibility in to the status.
They don’t cost that much. And there are cheaper options.
Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.
So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?
That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.
If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.
It reliably kernel panics since tahoe at a certain point
Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restoration.
> Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
I'd argue that's not even the main problem. If it just broke and gave you error on each run ("this SMB share is incompatible") it wouldn't be an issue
Is that 5% number real or your estimate?
It's a hand-waved estimate, but let's recognize that Apple actively plans on killing support for NAS targets for Time Machine:
> Time Machine backup to NAS devices over Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is not recommended and won't be supported in a future version of macOS.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423
AFP is what's deprecated, not Time Machine over networks. They just want you to use SMB.
Acknowledged. Thanks for pointing that out.
But that's AFP, not SMB. SMB is the future. [edit, that sounds sad].
Yeah, it sounds a bit high to me.
Another disturbing example of sloppy execution by Apple Software Engineering. This only reinforces my resolve to avoid upgrading to macOS Tahoe.
I just switched back to Sequoia. I gave Tahoe a good shot, used it for 4 months. Tahoe is half-baked. I upgraded to Tahoe because most of the complaints were cosmetic which I don't care about at all, but the problems are worse than cosmetic.
The last straw is that Finder's scroll bars are broken in Tahoe. I put up with it until I hit an emergency at work and was working as fast as I could (each minute mattered), Tahoe was slowing me down. Tahoe didn't pass the pressure test.
Avoid it as long as possible. Mail search is broken 4 out of 5 days that I attempt a search, and I need to go to the webmail versions of my accounts to find anything. Fortunately it's only something I need to do about once a day, unlike in prior lives, but holy crap they took the best ruing about macOS and kids destroyed jt completely.
Plasma on Linux is looking pretty tempting these days, especially with almost all office software being web based these days.
Switching email clients is a big lift that I need to investigate, and have been hesitant to jump into until absolutely necessary, but another week of this BS...
Apple has broken Time Machine enough times that I would never consider using it at all anymore. Once upon a time, it was really neat, had great integration with Mac OS X, and an amazing user interface and experience, but it's now clearly technology that Apple will probably eventually drop entirely in favor of something less impressive all together, like telling you to buy more iCloud Storage.
Hasn't the issues always been related to remote Time Machine? I have a usb drive I use and haven't heard of any issues with that setup. Am I missing something?
I lose my Time Machine drive, like, every year or two.
Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it and start anew.
Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.
99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.
Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.
My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so its not that big of a deal for her.
In the past, I've heard recommendations not to use remote Time Machine over SMB directly, but rather to create an APFS disk image on a remote server and then backup to that as if its an external hard drive.
Supposedly, doing that eliminates a lot of the flakiness specific to SMB Time Machine, and while I haven't tested it personally, I have used disk images over SMB on macOS Tahoe recently, and they actually work great (other than the normal underlying annoyances of SMB that everyone with a NAS is mostly used to at this point).
The new ASIF format for disk images added in Tahoe actually works very well for this sort of thing, and gives you the benefits of sparse bundle disk images without requiring specific support for them on the underlying file system.[1][2] As long as you're on a file system that supports sparse files (I think pretty much every currently used file system except FAT32, exFAT, and very old implementations of HFS+), you get almost native performance out of the disk image now. (Although, again, that's just fixing the disk image overhead, you still have to work around the usual SMB weirdness unless you can get another remote file system protocol working.)
[1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/12/macos-tahoe-brings-a-new...
[2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2025/09/17/should-you-use-tahoes-ne...
SMB on macOS is and always has, and probably will always be utter shit.
Mount something over NFS< and you'll be relieved about how snappy things remain. Snappy relatively of course.
Yes, there's some bug in the backupd that panic.. no matter smb/nfs
I use remote time machine as seem to be fine.