Time machine support when AFP is removed from macOS?

[Panda]

Using ConnectMeNow the mounting of the share has worked consistently and reliably. The opening of the sparse bundle however has worked often but not always. I've made the following changes which should improve the situation though it's too early to confirm it.

I've changed the script to add a sleep command (a great suggestion by the developer of ConnectMeNow), so it is now:
sleep 5; open /Volumes/<share name>/<sparse bundle name>.dmg.sparsebundle/

I also noticed that I had 'Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off’ (in System Settings/Battery) unticked. I’ve now enabled it.

(Unrelated, but if you decide to use ConnectMeNow, you may want to change, in its Network Preferences, the default polling of 10 seconds to the recommended 60 seconds to reduce its energy use impact.)


Update: the opening of the sparse bundle has been reliable so far since I've unticked the 'Quick Unmount shares on network loss' option in ConnectMeNow preferences.

 

[bennor]

FYI, in posting a reply related to Time Machine in another thread figured the following link should be posted here as it might be relevant since it references SMB and Time Machine. It may or may not be relevant to this discussion.
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/c...mon-invalid-host-name-fixed.72111/post-684939

 

[95453453]

Is asking ASUS to fix this the best approach? Hopefully they will fix it if it is brought to their attention. The more users that report the issue the more likely they are to prioritize it.

 

[muski]

Thanks to the pointers by @iTyPsIDg I now have my first backup over SMB going on.

It took me several attempts to get there as there are a few gotchas. Key ones are that the disk image must be created locally and then copied to the SMB share, and the disk image can't be added via the Time Machine dialog.

Here are the main steps that worked:

1) Create a new disk image in Disk Utility
Call it for instance ‘tm’
The size obviously needs to be bigger than what needs to be saved. I’m not sure how to choose the best size. I’ve set it to twice the amount of data I currently have.
Change the format to ‘sparse bundle disk image’
Set the encryption to 256-bit AES

Important: save it to the local hard disk, e.g., Desktop as if you save it directly to the SMB share it’ll fail.

Weirdly if you check in Disk Utility (Get Info) it’ll state that the image is unencrypted, however the following command
hdiutil isencrypted /Users/user/Desktop/tm.dmg
will show it as encrypted.

2) Move the image to the share. Open it and save its password.

3) Time Machine doesn’t see it, however you can add it with this command:
sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/tm/

4) Start your new Time Machine backup (preferably while physically connected to the router over Ethernet).

When that first back up is completed, I'll check the minimum needed for it to work automatically and there are good tips about this again in @iTyPsIDg earlier posts.

So it looks like I was wrong in suggesting that Time Machine backups over SMB are not supported. They're not supported from the GUI of Time Machine but they're possible with the current firmware which is a good news. Of course for better reliability you may opt out to purchase another Mac or a NAS, but it's possible *currently* to do Time Machine backups over SMB to a disk connected to an Asus router.

Thank you. Worked really well!

 

[ComputerSteve]

I also would like to know is Time Machine support going away because AFP is currently no longer supported @RMerlin ?