Per Synology, wireless Time Machine backup not supported!

[iliya1]

I just purchased a Macbook Air and have wasted a lot of money trying to get Time Machine to work. I think I've FINALLY come to the right place, but now I see a thread that says Synology does not support wireless Time Machine. Argh! How can that be?

I really don't want to buy a Time Capsule, but I HAVE to have Time Machine working.

If I buy a DS110j and a WD10EARX (it's on the list of supported drives), will Time Machine work over my wireless network using OS X Lion?

I'm tired of wasting money.

Thanks!

[Llama]

Like I said in the other posts, my DS409slim has been Time Machine'ing 4+ Mac clients wirelessly since Day 1. Now, that being said, I *have* had the message about the backup failing validation at least once on every machine, both before and post Lion (including 10.7.4 betas).

I still believe that the biggest reason for the errors being reported are that the Macs are sleeping/being shut while the TM is in progress, more than something particularly wrong with the Synology DSM. Your mileage may vary and some of the folks here seem to be particularly prone to the issue, even those with hardwired Macs.

I have reduced the frequency of the TM backups because it seemed like hourly was a little too fine a granularity for the scope of changes our Macs undergo through the day as well as restricted what times of day it would run at all, just to make sure the clients would be awake and less likely to be terminated by a user.

[iliya1]

I'm not comfortable with taking chances in this area. I'm going to give up on the NAS route. Since I already have an external USB drive, I'm going to return the Netgear WNDR3800 I just bought and get an Airport Extreme. It's a little more money, but worth it to me if it solves this issue.

Thanks for your help.

UPDATE: Well, so much for that idea. Apple does not recommned using an external drive on an AE with Time Machine. It seems it produces the exact same issues. Sigh... Just when I was starting to like Apple...

Oh well.

[riorben]

Has anyone with DSM4 update 2219 still had this issue?

Thanks,

~ Ben

[myCloud]

I've only had the setup in my signature for a month, but I've yet to see any problem with Time Machine backups on two MacBook Pros, one Snow Leopard and one Lion, both of which back up wirelessly every hour and are slept at night. But unlike the situation with the OP of this thread, our NAS has been on a UPS the entire time and has never lost power or been shut down hard, corrupting its file system. I've used both 2218 and 2219 OSes on the NAS.

As far as the Time Machine software itself, I've had it running 24x7 for four years on an internal drive in my Mac Pro at work, again, on a UPS. That included swapping it from a 1TB drive to a 3TB, use with Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion OSes, and a motherboard replacement. Pretty robust stuff.

[david_h]

I am having the same problems with an imac running lion. Backups are via wireless. My diskstation is on a ups so is operating ok. I am running the latest dsm 2219.

Timemachine backups run ok for a couple of days and then start to fail because Timemachine can no longer find the backup disk. I have learnt that you need to be able to see two entries for the diskstation in OSX Finder if backups are to work. I have no idea why. I can get backups to work again by doing a full restart of the imac.

[myCloud]

If you have "Show Connected Server" on in Finder preferences, you should see the Time Machine share pop up on the Mac desktop every time Time Machine runs. It mounts and unmounts the shared folder you have configured in the DiskStation. It sounds as if for some reason, the iMac isn't mounting that shared folder fast enough for Time Machine. Is the iMac or DiskStation particularly busy when this happens? Are you running out of memory on the iMac? If Page Outs is other than zero in Activity Monitor, the answer is yes. That's easy to do with only 4GB. How good is the visibility between the wireless router and the iMac?

[david_h]

Hi mycloud

I have a very solid wireless connection (the devices are only 3 metres apart). The problem only arises when Finder can only see one diskstation entry. For some reason there should be two. I am guessing it has something to do with the imac going to sleep. A full reboot restores both entries in Finder and all is good again.

[myCloud]

Hi mycloud

I have a very solid wireless connection (the devices are only 3 metres apart). The problem only arises when Finder can only see one diskstation entry. For some reason there should be two. I am guessing it has something to do with the imac going to sleep. A full reboot restores both entries in Finder and all is good again.

We sleep our MacBook Pros every night and don't have this problem. Check your memory.

[achew]

hi guys,
i've bought my ds212+ 2months ago, started with DMS3.x and time machine works perfectly. After 1 month time, i notice that somehow the time machine stopped working, after countless of google search,i still couldn't get it work. Finally i updated to DMS4, and the problem is still the same, now all my macs are not able to use time machine. On my desktop, the time machine folder is connected, but when i goes go time machine backup on my mac, it couldn't see my synology drive anymore, even i tried to setup a new time machine backup, it just couldn't detect my synology NAS. Any guru here know whats the problem or how to solve it??

[david_h]

mycloud - I've checked the memory and it is 4gb with 1 gb free

[myCloud]

That's good. It shows you what your memory usage currently is. Keep an eye on Page Outs, too. That shows you if you're running out of memory at times.

[dcbii]

I guess there are a number of ways to get this working. I'm using a DS1812 as a Time Machine backup for 5 Macs, 3 connected wirelessly, and I'm not having any issues. One Mac is running Leopard, 3 are running Snow Leopard, and one is running Lion.

I started with DSM 3.2 as that was the only DSM supported on the 1812 at first. I've since upgraded to the latest 4.0 DSM version (2219). However, my configuration is probably different than what others are using.

1. I don't have the Time Machine service running on the Synology at all. I wanted to use this, but you have to specify a share, and I wanted a different share for each Mac (see #2). I think this means that I'm just using AFP for the Time Machine backups rather than the remote Time Machine protocol (assuming that that's different).
2. I have 5 different Time Machine shares, one for each Mac. I wanted each backup in a directory by itself.
3. I have a different user for each of the Time Machine shares, so I can set a quota for each machine to use for backup. I use that user to connect from the corresponding Mac. A couple of the users also have privileges to other folders, depending on what the folders are used for, and what I use that Mac for.
4. Each Mac automounts the Time Machine share for that Mac at startup.
5. I run Time Machine only twice a day for each Mac (using TimeMachineEditor to change the frequency).

So far, since the beginning of March when I got the Synology, I haven't received any corrupt Time Machine backup notifications.

I've also noticed that the backups will work even if the share is not currently mounted. Apparently, since I had the Synology Time Machine share mounted when I configured it as the backup in the Time Machine pref panel, Time Machine will remember and automount that share when Time Machine starts. If it has to do that because it's not already mounted, it also unmounts it when it is finished.

[david_h]

Well my setup started working again. Backup works after sleep. The only thing I can remember doing is turning off autoblock.

[drm31078]

Well, I backed up on April 20th and haven't had a problem until today May 6th when I got the corrupt error message again. As you can see in my previous posts, I have tried numerous changes with apparently no success. Something has to be done about this.