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I have a UNAS-Pro, which runs the same Unifi Drive software as this, and it works great for Time Machine backups. Dead simple.

I also have tons of other Ubiquiti gear, and honestly there's not a ton of synergy between the NAS and everything else. It's a great NAS though. And also, it's only a NAS. It's not an application server like a Synology NAS.

by ksec2 hours ago|

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I only wish UNAS support ZFS.

by fragmede4 hours ago|

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Wireless Time Machine backup works until one day, Time Machine decides to shit the bed. Do not trust it. Invest in a different backup solution if your data is at all important to you. Something like Arq or Backblaze or tarsnap.

by js22 hours ago|

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I hear this sentiment a lot, but I've not had a problem with Time Machine in years across multiple MacBooks in my household. Backing up to TrueNAS. Unifi networking. It Just Works.

I just checked any my oldest TM backup for the MacBook from which I'm typing is 2023-09-14. This MacBook has a 2 TB SSD and I have the TM volume quota set to 3 TB. TM culls old backups as needed.

The TM GUI is still terrible, but you can use `tmutil listbackups` to easily access backups from the command line.

I also use Arq to B2.

by FireBeyond44 minutes ago|

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I've had all manner of issues, backing up via Ethernet and Wifi to FreeNAS and then to Synology. The only backups with Time Machine I had no issue with were to local USB drives.

Time Machine would work and work and work until one day... "Cannot write to your backup" and the whole thing would be corrupt and not even readable.

Flirted with Acronis TrueImage which was worse. Hell, even before catastrophic corruption, attempting to restore a file from a decent size catalog even over 10gbE would generally cause a beachball for minutes and then you had to be very careful to browse exactly to the location and file you wanted to restore (poking around trying to find it would inevitably totally crash the client, and even being careful sometimes would).

I ended up moving to Carbon Copy Cloner to Synology, with the Synology taking a snapshot 10 minutes before CCC starts its nightly run.

A few months in and it has been rock solid. If I want to restore I can just browse the snapshot in Synology and either copy a file directly from the Snapshot browser or mount the entire snapshot as a shared folder.

by tristor4 hours ago|

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I use the 3-2-1 strategy for backups. I keep one copy off-site by using cloud backups, currently I primarily use Backblaze for that purpose but am considering alternatives for several reasons. I keep a second copy on an external SSD via Time Machine, and I keep one copy on-device. I'd like to use network Time Machine to get rid of the inconvenience of having a bunch of USB external SSDs floating around, especially since none of them are large enough to backup my entire drive if I get close to filling it.

I appreciate the perspective, I definitely take backups seriously for my photography.

by oarsinsync4 hours ago|

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I think a combination of:

1/ ZFS datasets with hourly (or daily) snapshots

2/ Samba with vfs_fruit

Gives the peace of mind that even when the sparsebundle shits the bed, you can rollback to a suitable snapshot and only lose a small period of backups, rather than having to lose the entire history and start again from scratch.

(I say when, not if, through considerable experience over the last 15 years that it will always, inevitably, shit the bed.)

by tedd4u2 hours ago|

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A 2-drive Synology (e.g. DS225+) in RAID 0 or RAID 1 works fine for this, for 90% less than this beast. Synology documented their optimal settings for Time Machine a couple years ago, too. Hope this is helpful. [1]

[1] https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_back_up_fi...

by InTheArena2 hours ago|

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Or if you want something from a vendor butting running decade old hardware configs and trying to lock people into their drive ecosystem, UNas or many other options.

Stay away from synology.

by tristor38 minutes ago|

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I already have a DIY NAS w/ 14x 14TB drives in it running ZFS on FreeBSD. It does not play nicely with Time Machine over the network though, and has some other bugbears that I've resolved to fix by migrating to Linux and running ZFS on Linux, but have never got around to doing.

A 2 drive anything is not replacing my existing NAS + solving my backup use case, although I appreciate the sentiment of saving money.