Time Machine on TrueNas

[colinng]

I'm not sure if it is the parameters under the dataset that needs to be different...

Did Catalina ever back up correctly to your previous versions of FreeNAS or TrueNAS? I'm new to TrueNAS-12.0-U1. I was on the 11.3 train for a long time (recently migrating from FreeNAS-11.3-U4.1).

A long time ago I went through Time Machine hell (constantly having to recreate the backup). I have been on Catalina for a while, and it seems to work okay with the settings I mentioned for 12.0-U1, and also with my previous 11.3-U4.1. But I've only done a handful of backups on 12.0-U1 so it is too soon to tell.

 

[andrema2]

Did Catalina ever back up correctly to your previous versions of FreeNAS or TrueNAS? I'm new to TrueNAS-12.0-U1. I was on the 11.3 train for a long time (recently migrating from FreeNAS-11.3-U4.1).

A long time ago I went through Time Machine hell (constantly having to recreate the backup). I have been on Catalina for a while, and it seems to work okay with the settings I mentioned for 12.0-U1, and also with my previous 11.3-U4.1. But I've only done a handful of backups on 12.0-U1 so it is too soon to tell.

Before 12 it was pretty stable. I jump early to 12 and it was problematic since the beginning. Then it was ok for a while, not sure why, then it started acting strange again.
Today, it asked to start the backup from scratch twice.

 

[colinng]

Today, it asked to start the backup from scratch twice.

You have my sympathies. Unfortunately I don't know much about Time Machine, i.e. I don't know if it has logs such that we can see what caused it to decide it needs a new backup. Having any kind of transparency would relieve so much suffering.

Curious: did you update to 12, or build from scratch? I'm not at all proposing to build from scratch! I happened to have the opportunity so I did, and I was surprised at how different Time Machine support is. I do recall in the past having to do all this arcane stuff to get Time Machine to work over SMB (I started with FreeNAS 8, I believe.) And now it's just a checkbox, or a profile.

I am asking so I can ruminate about whether all the settings getting migrated, might be working against yourself.

But if in your place, I would want to find out how to get log info from the Time Machine backup process.

 

[seanm]

You have my sympathies. Unfortunately I don't know much about Time Machine, i.e. I don't know if it has logs such that we can see what caused it to decide it needs a new backup. Having any kind of transparency would relieve so much suffering.

macOS logs lots of stuff. See `man log` and also `man tmutil`.

 

[awasb]

Try t2m2:

XProCheck, T2M2, Ulbow, Consolation and log utilities

XProCheck – check on XProtect Remediator scans completed and reported in the log Updated! Inspects the Unified log for a period of 1-30 days and reports all completed and reported anti-malwar…

eclecticlight.co

 

[andrema2]

Try t2m2:

XProCheck, T2M2, Ulbow, Consolation and log utilities

XProCheck – check on XProtect Remediator scans completed and reported in the log Updated! Inspects the Unified log for a period of 1-30 days and reports all completed and reported anti-malwar…

eclecticlight.co

Thanks I’ll try it

 

[majorgear]

Gee, trust me to make this so complicated. I actually didn't need to do any of that renaming and stuff.

Just create the SMB share, use Purpose: No Preset, ADVANCED OPTIONS, check Time Machine.
Then connect to the share, verify you can see your old macName.backupbundle, then tell Time Machine to back up to it.

View attachment 44022

This basically creates the same as the Multi-user time machine but with no Path Suffix. The Path Suffix is what specifies the <username> dataset.

I'm confused a bit, don't I need to create a data set first, before the SMB share?

Do I create a single dataset, say "time_machine" ( if so, any special settings? ) , and then create the share as per your instructions? I had time machine "working" but the TM client wasn't respecting the space quota I set.

The macbook client had 800gb of data. I set the dataset quota at 4TB. If proceeded to fill up the dataset and display the error "backup failed, no space left of device". That was unexpected as TM knows the storage limit is 4TB, but instead of deleting old data to make room for new, it just gave up.