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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> Time machine's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse, leaving me having to cancel backups just so I can go home.

I'm administrating TimeMachine for my employer. It sucks so incredibly hard on a lot of points:

1) it requires the aged AFP protocol instead of Samba

2) No user-/machine-defineable quota, only one across the whole server

3) Extremely poor behavior in higher-than-10ms-latency scenarios

4) no way of scripting the configuration if one wants encryption of the backup image

5) Audits/reporting? Forget about it.

6) All backup images end up in one directory on the server, no way to specify e.g. the user's home directory

7) Restore takes ages

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Time Machine (and macOS in general) isn’t really intended for large office setups, it’s a personal backup system.

Time machine hasn’t required AFP for years. SMB is in fact the preferred protocol.

The SMB server does require a few extensions not all servers have adopted, so perhaps that’s what you’re referring to?

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/releasenotes/Net...

I've found it works really well as a personal backup, it's one of the things that keeps me on Macos. I can't rely on Windows backup in the same way, I have to use 3rd party software.

Samba on macos is also buggy itself. I have to relaunch finder manually every day if I don't unmount all volumes from my nas, because if the device sleeps with mounted volumes, they won't be working until you do so.

Versions of macOS 10.7 and up no longer use samba. Apple wrote their own smb client.[1]

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/inside_mac_os_x_1...

Which version are you on? I had that problem until High Sierra (10.13), and now I'm a bit reluctant to upgrade to Mojave (10.14) because it's working great.

I'm running catalina.

I switched to borg on all my macs, it’s so easy. I think most of the recent backup software is doing better than timemachine, which is really really slow via WiFi nowadays

You can use (encrypted) sparsebundle images with a given size limit as backup destination on the server.

Do you have a guide on how to do this?

Unfortunately, there is no up-to-date and comprehensive guide out there. I should write one i guess. I takes some tinkering. This is a good first start: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/turn-nas-windows-share-time-ma... If you’re using a USB drive, I recommend to make the first backup while directly attached to save some time. Also if the server is a Mac (and I believe there are ways to do that with other OSs too), you can simulate a time machine capsule. Now whenever I am in my home wifi my MacBook does automatic backups.

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