Backup Mac to TrueNAS / FreeNAS using TimeMachine (works with Multiple Macs)

[@fielitz]

I came here to learn how to configure TrueNAS for backing up my Mac. Stopped listening after 3 Minutes and just enjoyed your reassuring voice. You should get in contact with Calm and read some Good Night Stories. Children will love you. Also, listened for a second time and set up time machine. Easily understandable instructions with a voice who makes me feel like I can achieve everything. Will subscribe instantly!

[@SpaceRexWill]

This might be the single greatest comment I have gotten lol. Thanks!

[@fanaticheart]

I've watched several other videos to try to do this and yours is the only one where it actually worked out for me. And I'm using TrueNas Scale, but it was basically the same. Thank you so much!

[@andrewportzer]

You are a legend! Super simple instructions, great explanation into every step and why you’re doing it and it just worked perfectly. Subbed!

[@SpaceRexWill]

Thanks man!

[@sinisterpisces]

This is spectacular. I'm setting up my first TrueNAS Core box, and the first thing I wanted to do with it was get a TimeMachine backup target going. Perfect tutorial. So clear and easy to follow that I'm almost disappointed I can't set up more shares tonight, but I can't break into people's bedrooms while they're sleeping to grab their laptops for time machine setup. :P I really appreciated the demonstration of how to set a quota, too. I was a bit overwhelmed with which of the quotas to set, given how many options there are. (Per dataset? Just this dataset? Dataset and children?) It was great to be able to run through this tutorial and confidently ignore all the knobs I don't understand yet. ;)

[@podvrsac]

Thank you very much! Works *much* better than some generic instructions I've found on the Web. It does take a bit more time to setup but it's very reliable. Instructions are very clear and easy to follow, just the way they should be.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Thanks! This video was a pain to setup as you have to get everything just right or it will not work so I’m glad you liked it!

[@pmgodfrey]

I watch this video every single time I have to do this to add a machine. It is so incredibly useful and I'm grateful for it... I'm running 13.0-U3.1. I have "Browsable to Network Clients" unchecked in [Sharing / SMB / Edit / Advanced Options] so the shares aren't visible. Time Machine still connects and works with no issues.

[@chrisfromthelc]

This is exactly the info I came back to this video looking for. I didn't like that all my machines (I have several Macs used by different people) could see all the TM folders. Thanks!

[@djcaru1]

Thank you so much! After a morning of trying and failing to get this working I followed these steps, restarted everything, and the backup is now running (4 hours to go at this point).

[@miekwest1]

Excellent video! Would have taken me hours and days - and a heap of frustration - to sort this, being a new TrueNAS and iMac user! Your tutorials have gotten me up and running! Many thanks.

[@SpaceRexWill]

haha thanks! this one actually took a lot of reshoots as if anything is slightly off it doesn't work

[@BeyondTheCreed]

Worked like a charm on TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.1. The new interface required a little hunt and peck but following Steve Rookard's heads up to omit the auxiliary parameters for the SMB share guaranteed success.

[@srookard]

Great tutorial. However, on TrueNAS-SCALE-22.02.3, I was only able to get this working by OMITTING the Auxiliary Parameters. In the SMB Share, Purpose = No presets Checked options = Enabled, Time Machine, Enable Shadow Copies, Export Recycle Bin, Use Apple-style Character Encoding, Enable Alternate Data Streams, Enable SMB2/3 Durable Handles.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Ok good to know!

[@lukababu]

I was able to get it working with Aux. Also, I set the preset as Time Machine and then enabled Apple-style Character Encoding :)

[@RonMalouin]

OMG it works :) thank you so much. I have to say your videos are some of the best on KZbin.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Thanks man!

[@JasonBourneID]

Thanks for the time saver. Clear and easy to follow, I should be good to quickly make user shares as well now. I like the fact that finder and Time Machine can point to 2 shares using different accounts. Right on, happy new year!

[@SpaceRexWill]

Yeah it makes it a ton easier for a setup like this!

[@raynavarrete7898]

Thank you so much! I first tried other tutorials I found online, all a few years old, and run into trouble. I guess it can't be helped that tutorials go quickly out of date.

[@SE-161]

You are the best! I was looking exactly for this topic and your tutorial was so informative so that it just took a few minutes to setup timemachines on all of my Apple devices. No external devices needed anymore. Thank you so much!

[@piccione_viaggiatore]

Thank you a lot! Very detailed but straight forward guide. You solved the issues that I was having with my disk, that caused the first time machine backup to fail after a few minutes. It was probably caused by some advanced options that I didn't enable (Apple SMB2/3 were not enabled by default, and that was probably the cause of my problem)

[@SpaceRexWill]

Glad to help!

[@alex.pozgaj]

Wonderful! Thanks A LOT - the first tutorial that I found on this topic that actually worked and was 100% clear to follow!

[@9a21x]

Second time I came across a video of yours for my niche needs, thank you for taking the time to make this. I really appreciate it, especially as a new Mac user!

[@janvanwyk6905]

Thank you very much for this, it simplified the entire process. Great work

[@siddharthsinghchaudhry9184]

thank you. so easy to follow. my time machine on trueness is all set watching your vid - in 10 minutes. brilliant. FYI also used your vid for plex server setup. thanks again 😊

[@MaikSchott]

fantastic! You are a magician - worked immediately, very well explained. Thanks a lot!

[@gx9254]

Followed this exactly and it worked perfectly, thank you!

[@marcoantonio2600]

Excellent video. I was struggling with this and I am going to try this foloowing your steps outlined here. Thanks!

[@Sama_09]

sweet that is fast, I have now been able to successfully mount my true nas and use it for timemachine. definitely need a tutorial for mounting nfs drive onto mac easy way !

[@NickRabbott]

Thank you! I was struggling for a couple hours with the SMB configuration so this was very helpful

[@salesforcejeremy]

A true hero :) Commenting to thank you and for reach.

[@BeardyMacBeardFace]

Great stuff! Thanks very much for this! It's been a while since I used True/FreeNAS and it seems things might have changed a little. You got me back up and running super quick and easy! 👍

[@ryanriddell8376]

Great video, best I've found yet on the topic. If you could add those attributes to the description and what they do, that'd be helpful. Thanks!

[@tiantheron]

For anyone who comes in here and finds issues with connecting to the share after creating it, you'll need the everyone@ permissions in the ACL set for transverse so that the share can be browsed/accessed. Truenas no longer adds that by default as of 13.1, so there was an extra step. You can see it at 5:45 here.

[@PedroFonseca5]

Just a quick tip: You can also just setup 1 SMB Share with the exact same parameters and add "%U" to Path Suffix. This way, when opening the share it will automatically dive into a sub-directory that is the same name as the username. You just have to make sure you give the dataset inside the main "timemachine" dataset, the same name as the username

[@HiltonPalmaLima]

Great tutorial! One of the best I have seen. I will try this soon. Thank you.

[@chasehutchison6917]

Excellent Video! this really helped me fix my config for backups. The one I had before broke and now I realize I had it really poorly setup

[@SpaceRexWill]

Glad I could help!

[@Mike-sx4sk]

Worked in one go! Great Video

[@PaulSturmTexas]

Very well done - worked first try, though I didn't add the share to my Mac. Time Machine saw it on the network and let me use it anyway so for those who don't need the share, you can skip that last few steps on you Mac.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Glad it worked! I added the mounting of the share in there to confirm that the user has the proper permissions. But it’s not strictly necessary

[@djgawler]

great video. thanks champ

[@johnnydavis4338]

Thank you so much! Thanks from Germany.

[@dmitrykarpinskiy6044]

Thanks for manual! Work like a charm!

[@Wildsou76]

Thank you very much for your very good explanation!👍👍 Also works on TrueNas Scale!👌

[@hsin3872]

Thank you for the best helpful tutorial. Nice man!

[@denisp7130]

Thanks! Your videos helped me

[@dostufph]

Very well done. This works perfectly.

[@clark-mcd]

Would love an updated version of this for Scale. Getting hung up on a few of the differences.

[@pfloydphanatic]

Great info, worked like a charm. Just a little too fast for a TrueNAS beginner like myself. Thanks.

[@ВладимирСизов-т7г]

Потрясающе подробная инструкция! Большое спасибо!

[@jayzn1931]

For those setting it up in 2024: MacOS now supports setting a size limit in time machine.

[@TerryVogelaar]

This was so helpful; thank you!

[@tediorelee]

nice video! totally works on TrueNAS scale too

[@SpaceRexWill]

Oh awesome! One less video to make!

[@akshaykkapoor]

perfect..great explanation !! keep up the good work

[@mountainjew9]

Thanks man that was super helpful

[@tsdorsey]

Thanks. Worked beautifully.

Wow, thanks very helpful!!

[@ITWorksSoftware]

Thank you so much. This helped me setup a TimeMachine backup on my TrueNAS server (in addition to my external drive...you can do both!). Only problem I had was I needed to setup a USER with the same exact name as the user on my Mac. Seems you can't just make up a name. Give that USER the ACL and all is good. Thanks!

[@SpaceRexWill]

You actually can edit the name your mac connects with on your mac! you just edit the user when you connect (its a common misconception)

[@Namtrooper81]

Thank you very much. Great tutorial.

[@Namtrooper81]

Ok. Guess I'm not completely done yet. Time machine is creating a .sparsebundle file in the destination that is about 4.13GB in size, but nothing else happens. Used space on the mac is about 300GB so I highly doubt the compression can break records.

[@oskarsfreimanis8192]

Thanks. It really works! Fantastic!

[@romayojr]

6:15 for this part, i can connect to my truenas server and it show me a list to select the mac user to mount volume but after i select from the list i get an error message "there was a problem connecting to the server". i restarted smb service and even rebooted my truenas server but same issue. thoughts?

[@romayojr]

fixed it! remove the following vfs objects auxiliary parameters as it's not needed and works just fine without it. sharing>windows shares(smb)>advanced options vfs objects=fruit streams_xattr

[@roletheparadise1478]

@@romayojr You are a legend, thank you truly!!

[@markzhitnitsky7029]

you're the goat thank you for sharing your solution

[@ahmedelemam3639]

perfect video, i didn't face a single issue

[@nshades09]

Solid guide. Thanks!

[@hasanislamoglu53]

thanks. very help full. btw, the script starts with "vsf objects =" is unnecessary.

[@bcas400g1]

thank you for this video! I was able to get the NAS setup, but when I try to connect from MacBook Air via CMD K, I put in user and PW but it says something went wrong, cannot connect. I have double checked all the account PW are correct. Help!

[@StyxAI]

Another great tutorial SpaceRex. FYI - TrueNAS-SCALE-22.02.3, the share will not connect if the Aux parameters you provided are populated. Issuing the command 'testparm -s' shows that these parameters are already active on the share with "vfs objects = catia fruit streams_xattr shadow_copy_zfs ixnas zfs_core io_uring"

[@Croquetalandia]

Awesome content, thanks for sharing !

[@NordVaravarn]

Thank you so much for sharing this :)

[@nastyswap]

Great video, very helpfull. Thanks

[@mbayecamaradak]

Good explanations !

[@yasharfazili4016]

This is gold!

[@SpaceRexWill]

Glad you like the video!

[@fpupesh]

Awesome video, thank you very much :)

[@cvzone]

Thank you very much. Very helpfull. I made a typo (= fruits instead of fruit) and this blocked access to the time machine already. TruNas is not really for beginners...

[@abelherreram]

todady I had a probmlem with trueNas on TimeMachine for old osx and the soluction was add more parameters in vfs objects: vfs objects = aio_fbsd tmprotect fruit streams_xattr shadow_copy_zfs ixnas.

[@djilaliactor]

Thank you for this awesome tutorial! Everything works great however I've noticed that time machine only keeps the latest back up. I was hoping I could go back in time machine and potentially retrieve files from a week-back or maybe even more.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Time Machine should go through and keep a history. If you look in the time machine explorer you should see old versions

[@djilaliactor]

@@SpaceRexWill hey thank you for your reply I actually complained too fast. After five days I realize that it is actually backing up day by day. I'm able to go back to October 21, so it's working fine, it just took its time obviously day by day lol.

[@alexbowe2316]

Is there a downside to creating user accounts for each family member (who may have accounts on different machines and will also want to access the TrueNas server shares) and adding them all to the TimeMachine group?

[@GuillaumeEynaud]

Brilliant, thanks

[@aeiplanner]

I followed these directions to set up Time Machine backups for my MacBook pro. However, after upgrading to Ventura, Time Machine fails to connect to the shared drive on my TrueNas. I can navigate to and access the drive using the finder, but Time Machine doesn't work.

[@brewerth]

Great video. The only issue I have is that the share appears as "mnt" on my Mac not "mac1" to use your example. Other than that it works.

[@SpaceRexWill]

I think you may have selected the folder above mac1 or put the wrong name in the SMB settings

[@JPrez-io6qj]

Thanks for taking the time to create this..one question though...at the 6:07 mark, should the group remain Wheel or should it be modified to TimeMachine. I'm trying to understand why the time machine users were all added to a single group if that group isn't being used in some way for ACL purposes. Thanks

[@SpaceRexWill]

Its just good practice to do this. Later on you can go through and ban these users from anything that you need to and just control them however you want to. I always set this up as good practice

[@bobkoss280]

I was following along until you got to connecting to the share from the mac. Yours showed the dataset for mac1. Mine shows the dataset TimeMachine. Did I do something wrong?

[@Pnrc-b2u]

Thank you that was awesome

[@npirzkal]

Nice and accurate. Thanks!

[@redgalaxy6177]

Great video, as always :) Can you please do a video about the workflow with onedrive and synology, because its not possible to setup hyper backup or any other backup for onedrive. Unfortunality cloudsync is not a backup solution. I think a lot of people would appreciate this.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Not super familiar with one drive. Not sure what protocol it uses but will look into it

[@redgalaxy6177]

@@SpaceRexWill Thank you! This would be great :)

[@Gabriel-ix6jl]

Thanks man!

[@badspaceguy2431]

Saw this guide after I had already set up time machine via SMB. It seems like I did not set "Apple-style Character Encoding." Is this a problem?

[@jarnorosvall5414]

Thanks for guide :) Working! what i made wrong, my mac show that directory only with name mnt not that name what i set like your guide says exsample mac1

[@giorgiopierpaoli5908]

Your guide is very useful for a quick start of Mac backup. Why don’t use an AFP server, that is the preferred protocol of Time Machine?

[@SpaceRexWill]

1) because SMB fully works for Time Machine. 2) AFP has actually been removed from MacOS. With the most recent update you cannot even use it

[@markuswenzel767]

@@SpaceRexWill I mount all my TrueNAS datasets with AFP running MacOS 11.4 without a problem. And with the 10G interface I found out that AFP is faster than SMB :-O

[@OldNorsebrewery]

would you please share the code that you copy/pasted in the share?

[@danielius6898]

vfs objects = fruit streams_xattr

[@gmarch4618]

Thank you for the detailed presentation. However I am not getting this to work. I have an old Macbook running El Capitan. It wont take another upgrade so it just stays at the code its on. The TimeMachine backups i have running now are to a Synology over AFP. Could this be an issue?

[@bassemshaaban]

@spacerex Does this work on a remote NAS that isn't on the same network? Can it work with a VPN set up to the remote NAS?

[@bendutton]

hi thanks for this video , i followed along like for like however i'm using TrueNas scale . but this is not working for me any idea of this only works on truenas core?

[@jhnbtr]

thank you

[@peterc.7807]

If you want other users that are part of the group to be able to access the dataset then I believe when you should also set the GROUP to the appropriate timemachine group - I needed this to allow users that are not owner, but only part of the timemachine group access to the samba share. If anyone needs this. I need it because i setup all the backups in my home for different people so I am part of the group, not the owner and now I can see all timemachine backups if I need to.

[@paulcracknell5992]

Hi, thanks for a great video. I need help with the auxiliary parameters. I cannot see what you type in and can clearly hear you say “vfs objects = fruit” but cannot hear what come next . I would extremely grateful if you could write in a reply exactly what I should type in. Thanks again

[@paulcracknell5992]

Cancel that last request. I watched the video again on a large screen tv and all was clear. The backups for 2 macs are working great thanks.

[@KuroiPK]

Could you do a video about photo sharing with freeNAS? Now that google photo cost money, I think there are a lot of people interested in alternatives

[@SpaceRexWill]

I think the best bet for that would be next cloud. And I have been meaning to do a video on it!

[@KuroiPK]

@@SpaceRexWill yeah thought so too, thanks

[@rBennich]

Is it possible to have a separate user for time machine and other shares for the same mac? Or should it be the same user login for both to work at the same time?

[@SpaceRexWill]

You can have them be the same account but for security it’s nice to segregate those off

[@RobertGrimm]

Don't create a second share until your first is finished with the initial backup. macOS does not handle losing that connection gracefully. Setting it up and getting it working was quick and easy thanks to this video. Half an hour in to the backup, I thought I would start another one. It took about two hours of troubleshooting and I ended up having to delete everything and start over with different names for the share and user to get the first Mac to reconnect. It just kept saying it couldn't find the original object, even after I did a cleaning with Onyx and removed a hidden folder in /Volumes that could only be deleted by root from a recovery mode terminal. Apple really needs to get better at dealing with improperly disconnected file systems. I've had similar problems with a failing USB drive too. Connections fail, especially when networks are involved.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Ah, you want to make a completely separate destination for each Mac you backup

[@lzxty6024]

For some reason I go from preparing backup to nothing at all. it just stops.

[@trumanhw]

REMEMBER: ADD EXCLUSIONS ... AS YOU'LL NEVER BOOT FROM THIS BACKUP (w/o more settings I can't recall; obviously you can add net-boot, I just can't recall how)

[@21Lettere]

In the "Edit permissions" of the dataset, I think that the group should be "TimeMachine" instead of wheel.

[@ryanriddell8376]

Making it wheel would mean that all the mac users (e.g., mac2) would have access to the other time machine backups. He's granting access just to mac1.

[@21Lettere]

@@ryanriddell8376 So, as I wrote, that option should be set to "TimeMachine" and not "wheel". Am I right?

[@markcollin5779]

Why are you using a dataset with a quota rather than a zvol with a specified size? Is there a benefit to using a dataset instead of a zvol?

[@SpaceRexWill]

A zvol does not have a file system on it. You use a dataset when you need a file system (needed to use SMB)

[@markcollin5779]

@@SpaceRexWill Installed TrueNAS Scale and had a fiddle with creating some zvols and you are right it doesn't work the way I was hoping it would. TimeMachine seems to have had a bit of APFS love since Bug Sur came out, with some nice clever file deduplication resulting in much smaller backups compared to a standard samba shares. I was hoping to create a large zvol, format it as APFS and then section off parts of that volume as different shares for the different macs that back up to Time Machine to give me faster and smaller backups, sadly it seems that that is not really an option. I did have a look at the iSCSI route, but it seems like more hassle than it's worth on MacOS due to the lack of native support, limited open source support and the commercial options are either out of date or really expensive ($200 per Mac). Back to SMB backups it is. Thanks for the video, lots of useful tips, one thing I did find though was I had to tweak my Samba aux parameters in System Settings for SMB to get decent throughput, initially it was not using anywhere close to my network capability. These settings seem to work well: read raw = yes write raw = yes strict locking = no oplocks = yes deadtime = 15 getwd cache = yes max xmit = 65535 use sendfile= true aio read size = 16384 aio write size = 16384 If you have any suggestions for better settings I would be interested to hear them.

[@zyghom]

super nice however I used only 1 dataset - common for all - and 1 user - common for all - a bit less to configure on every computer. Anyway MacOS encrypts each backup so no issue someone can read someone's else data

[@Yendi233]

Anyone else having issues getting the Mac to restore from the smb share folders? I got it to work only once and it won’t work anymore it won’t allow me to login to the share to restore from a Time Machine backup. It works normally while logged in, just not from the restore screen

[@jakefowler4246]

It would have been nice had you included a transcript of the extra commands you typed rather than just speak them, so we could get them correct. I'm hoping this is correct: vfs objects = fruit streams_xattr

[@a_landstander]

This seems like a great guide, but it just doesn't work. Trying with TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.1 + m1 macbook air and an m1 mac mini. Can connect to the share and create files directly with finder, but time machine's "add backup disk" just keeps prompting for the user/password repeatedly.

[@LBarouf]

Doesn't this prevent the users from using both Time Machine and home folder? finder will attempt to sign-in to the SMB share using the Time Machine user instead of the user account. Am I missing anything? I guess the users could mount and NFS mount for their home folder instead.

[@SpaceRexWill]

Finder actually uses a different login user account than time machine. This is why you are able to use two different accounts