Timemachine backups: Mounting of backup drive fails

[-fun-]

Is this a common problem? When my Mac starts a time machine backup from time to time this just fails. In this case I can see this in the Konsole:

20151228 14:13:09,307 com.apple.backupd[1675]: NAConnectToServerSync failed with error: 80 for url: afp://fu@unger.local/Timemachine_FlosMBP
20151228 14:13:09,307 com.apple.backupd[1675]: Authentication error (80) - the correct user or password info may not exist in the System.keychain or the server may no longer allow access for this user.

Needless to say that I didn't change any configuration neither on the Mac nor on FreeNAS, for example in regard to user names or passwords.

After a retry most of the time the backup can be completed without problems. Sometimes it takes 2 or more retries.

In the bug database I came across this issue:

https://bugs.pcbsd.org/issues/4808

This is closest to my own problem. However restarting the afp service as well as increasing the maximum number of connections (as mentioned in the bug description) do not solve the problem.

Is this a problem for anyone else here and is there a known solution or workaround? (I can deal with the problem however it is definitely not production ready for migrating my wife's time machine backup to the FreeNAS server. :()

 

[jgreco]

Apple is slowly deprecating AFP, and the number of problems reported seems to be increasing. Is it possible to use CIFS instead of AFP?

 

[danb35]

No, Time Machine won't work over CIFS.

 

[jgreco]

So how the %$$@*&@# does Apple intend to retire AFP then?

 

[anodos]

So how the %$$@*&@# does Apple intend to retire AFP then?

Easy. Deprecate time machine in favor of 'the cloud'. Isn't that what all the cool kids are doing?

 

[-fun-]

Timemachine doesn't work with anything but AFP.

And while that's all fine with cloud and whatever: I have several older Macs here that don't run a current Mac OS X. So it wouldn't even help if Apple had this working with CIFS or the cloud in the most recent OS X. Apple may be have been strong in providing smooth migration paths (Motorola 68k to Power and Power to Intel processor platforms for example, this was very impressing) but Apple also tends to drop support for older Hardware quite fast.

Back to the concrete problem: My Mac backups smoothly to a Timecapsule but not to my FreeNAS box. I would not blame Apple here. According to the above mentioned issue the bug may even be located in netatalk. I was just hoping to get an impression on how many people have experienced this problem. Rationale: If this is a common issue I won't spend too much time here.

 

[jgreco]

Easy. Deprecate time machine in favor of 'the cloud'. Isn't that what all the cool kids are doing?

That seems more of a cynical remark than anything based in reality.

Please don't do my job for me.

 

[anodos]

That seems more of a cynical remark than anything based in reality.

Please don't do my job for me. :)

Cynicism and IT go hand-in-hand. It's what keeps us warm in the server room.

 

[jgreco]

And while that's all fine with cloud and whatever: I have several older Macs here that don't run a current Mac OS X. So it wouldn't even help if Apple had this working with CIFS or the cloud in the most recent OS X. Apple may be have been strong in providing smooth migration paths (Motorola 68k to Power and Power to Intel processor platforms for example, this was very impressing) but Apple also tends to drop support for older Hardware quite fast.

I'm not sure what you mean by "quite fast"; for example, everything from the MacMini3,1 onwards supports El Capitan, and that platform is now nearly eight years old. My iPad 2 from 2011 is still getting OS updates entering nearly its sixth year, which is quite impressive for a mobile device - admittedly the phones don't fare as well.

Back to the concrete problem: My Mac backups smoothly to a Timecapsule but not to my FreeNAS box. I would not blame Apple here. According to the above mentioned issue the bug may even be located in netatalk. I was just hoping to get an impression on how many people have experienced this problem. Rationale: If this is a common issue I won't spend too much time here.

Apple can be blamed, easily enough... their reluctance to make something that can be reliably implemented by a third party is a little annoying. Plus, the netatalk guys have a history of being underfunded and it has to be frustrating as all hell to be working on a product to run a protocol that's effectively going to be EOL as Apple transitions towards CIFS. Plenty of blame to lay at Apple's feet.

I don't really know what to tell you about your problem. I haven't been bothering to run Time Machine on AFP for awhile now; the problems were really bad several years ago so I just put a local disk on the Macs for local TM. The newer versions of OS X can theoretically support multiple TM targets but I haven't done it.

 

[anodos]

I don't really know what to tell you about your problem. I haven't been bothering to run Time Machine on AFP for awhile now; the problems were really bad several years ago so I just put a local disk on the Macs for local TM. The newer versions of OS X can theoretically support multiple TM targets but I haven't done it.

This is exactly my experience. Time Machine via netatalk would work great, except when it would randomly crash requiring you to reinitialize your time machine target (from a blank slate). I switched to performing time machine backups via USB Hard Drive, which I store in a fireproof safe. You want your backups to be as fool-proof and reliable as possible. Time machine via netatalk is not that.

 

[jgreco]

That plus the fact that the shared NAS storage is hella-expensive whereas a nice external drive like the Toshiba Canvio Slim II 1TB is $60 on sale. I like those drives because they don't have the typical stupid curved plastic shell; you could actually stack them.

 

[-fun-]

Thanks for the recommendations. I still have a Time Capsule here which is more convenient than using an external drive IMO. I guess I will be switching back to using this one. Time machine is not a real backup for me. So losing a backup history is not a real threat to me. I'm using it because it's there and it is a convenient way to get older versions of files back. I do have other means of backup including cloned drives which the Macs allow to boot from and get back up and running in seconds.

On the plus side: I can get rid of all the AFP stuff on my FreeNAS now. Apart from Time machine I didn't have any need for that anyway.

Regarding support of older HW: I have an older Macbook from 2008 (7 years now) which will not run anything newer than Snow Leopard. Think back to when this became deprecated, its already a while now. It is one thing to bring a new version of an OS to older HW but it is another thing to stop delivering security fixes. This is something that Apple can do and no one seems to be embarrassed. Think of how long Microsoft provided security fixes for this dead horse Windows XP. (And this is not because XP is the less secure system, we all know that OS X is not the most flawless OS in terms of security ...)

 

[jgreco]

That's more because Microsoft made such a mess of the things that they tried to introduce after XP (incl browser issues).

Apple has a little more liberty to actually lock older HW out, and incentives as well, since they basically sell HW not SW.

 

[volckg]

@ -fun-
I have a FreeNAS box runing FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201512121950 and an older MacPro running El Capitan. TimeMachine actually saves every second backup on the FreeNAS box on a samba share. Just google around to find how it works. It's not officially supported by Apple, though.

The trick is to create a growing sparsebundle on a local Mac hd using something like:
hdiutil create -type SPARSEBUNDLE -size 2000g -fs HFS+J -volname FreeNAS-TimeMachine "/Volumes/somewhere/somename.sparsebundle“
Then copy your local sparsebundle to the samba share. Mount the sparsebundle on the samba share with DiskimageMounter.app
Switch off TimeMachine
In a Terminal on the Mac: sudo tmutil setdestination "/Volumes/FreeNAS-TimeMachine“ (the path to your mounted sparseimage) on the mac.
Open TimeMachine and point it to your sparseimage.
Switch on TimeMachine

Have fun,
Gerrit

 

[-fun-]

Thanks for this description! That sounds reasonable. Does time machine remount the sparseimage itself whenever needed?

Actually I have this working right now with afp. It was working flawlessly in the beginning and then stopped working reliable. This was when I created the original post in this thread.

From the bug description of https://bugs.pcbsd.org/issues/4808 I took the suggestion to set the time machine target manually like this:

Code:

sudo tmutil setdestination -p afp://fu@unger.local/Timemachine_FlosMBP

Before this I deleted all time machine targets form the keychain.

I have no clue why this works but apparently it does. This probably also means that the problem was probably on the Mac and not on the FreeNAS server. I stand corrected regarding this.

 

[volckg]

Thanks for this description! That sounds reasonable. Does time machine remount the sparseimage itself whenever needed?

It usually does :) Sometimes it does not after reboot or wake up from sleep. Then a mouse-click on the samba share in finder is all that is needed to reconnect. If TimeMachine cannot reconnect automatically, you get an onscreen message.

 

[-fun-]

Well that's a pity. Manually reconnecting a drive is not wife-compatible. Does time machine recover by itself the next time the backup is scheduled? Or will is keep throwing errors until the drive has been manually reconnected?

 

[volckg]

TimeMachine doesn't trigger a reconnection to network shares. However, after dragging the icon of my FreeNAS-Share into the login objects in system prefs -> user & groups -> Username the reconnection seems to work now. That should increase the womens acceptance factor

 

[-fun-]

Ah yes, didn't think of the startup objects. That should actually work.