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Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

Time Machine has been broken for years.

Backing up to local storage, or through ethernet has worked, but when backing up via WiFi it routinely comes up with the "Time Machine needs to recreate your backup" message.

Furthermore Time Machine insisted (probably still does) on using the deprecated AFP protocol that even Apple no longer maintains.

A backup that cannot be trusted is not a backup, so years ago i switched to Arq Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com/) instead. While not as "polished" as Time Machine (Restore functionality could _really_ use some work) it actually works, and in all my years of using it, i have never experienced a failed repository.

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I wondered about that. Back when my Air was still running macOS I setup netatalk on a linux server so I could point Time Machine there. But every few weeks I got that message and had to repair my backup. I always assumed it was some issue with netatalk or my configuration. Eventually I gave up and used an external drive.

I get this message every few weeks. Is there any way to fix the backup? Until now i thought my synology nas is the culprit...

I get it too when using synology. This is what always fixes the backup for me: https://jd-powered.net/notes/fixing-your-time-machine-backup...

It only works with SMB in actual versions of macOS. But it insist of using AFP+ as its Filesystem.

My laptop is set to back up to a share on a mac os desktop, in theory. So whatever protocol they like. It says the last backup was made on Aug 22. I never turned it off.

It doesn't look like it works even between macs via SMB to me.

Mind, the laptop is on 10.14 and the desktop on 10.13, so that may be a problem.

> But it insist of using AFP+ as its Filesystem.

(Assuming you mean APFS) Not true. I have Openmediavault running on my raspberry pi 4 and the two drives i use for dual-backup are both ext4. (can really recommend RPI4+OMV for time machine btw)

> I have Openmediavault running on my raspberry pi 4 and the two drives i use for dual-backup are both ext4.

I suspect that's because the Time Machine solutions for NASes create a sparse bundle that has a HFS+ (or APFS, I'm not up-to-date) partition within.

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