Time machine disk not found

[Megahurtz]

I've been running Time Machine for many many months using a USB drive attached to my GT-AX6000 to back up to. After not using my computer much lately, I recently discovered that no backups had occurred for the past two weeks. I thought that might have been because I didn't use my computer during that time, but when I tried to manually initiate a backup it failed to connect to the disk.

I have restarted both my computer and router multiple times. Turned Time Machine off/on in the router settings multiple times. I tried removing the TM disk from my computer's settings intending to re-add it, but now it can't even discover the disk. I tried to add it to a different MacBook and that also couldn't find the disk.

Here is what I see when TM starts up on the router:

rc_service: httpd 2969:notify_rc restart_timemachine
Jun 30 15:17:02 Timemachine: daemon is stopped
Jun 30 15:17:02 Timemachine: User select disk start TimeMachine
Jun 30 15:17:02 avahi-daemon[22262]: WARNING: No NSS support for mDNS detected, consider installing nss-mdns!
Jun 30 15:17:02 afpd[22270]: Couldn't open extension maping file /usr/etc/extmap.conf
Jun 30 15:17:02 afpd[22270]: Couldn't load extension -> type/creator mappings file "/usr/etc/extmap.conf"
Jun 30 15:17:02 cnid_metad[22273]: Couldn't open extension maping file /usr/etc/extmap.conf
Jun 30 15:17:02 cnid_metad[22273]: Couldn't load extension -> type/creator mappings file "/usr/etc/extmap.conf"
Jun 30 15:17:02 cnid_metad[22273]: CNID Server listening on localhost:4700
Jun 30 15:17:02 afpd[22270]: Netatalk AFP/TCP listening on 192.168.1.1:548
Jun 30 15:17:05 Timemachine: daemon is started
Jun 30 15:17:05 avahi-daemon[22314]: WARNING: No NSS support for mDNS detected, consider installing nss-mdns!
Jun 30 15:17:05 avahi-daemon[22314]: Alias name GT-AX6000: avahi_server_add_cname failure: The requested operation is invalid because redundant

From what I've read those extmap and avahi cname messages are normal. Any ideas?

 

[sfx2000]

Try to mount the shared folder via Finder...

If Finder can't find the share, you need to sort out the mount within AsusWRT.

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FWIW - it's really hard to recommend using TM with any router's shared folder implementation - Netatalk/AFP has been deprecated now for some time, and on Apple Silicon, it's not supported at all.

This even applies to Apple's Airport Extreme and TimeCapsule devices as they have not had updates in years now...

The best backup destination for TimeMachine is always direct attached storage, hands down...

For Network based backup on TimeMachine - the best solution there is another Mac with Shared Folders...

TimeMachine has evolved much - moving from AFP over to SMB/CIFS and the SparseBundle Internals from HFS+ over to APFS - Apple doesn't document much about what they do with TM, so third party solutions are basically reverse engineered.

I use a Mac Mini 2018 Intel Core i5 with an 8TB external drive over USB3 to back up all the Macs on my LAN - that's 6 Macs, and the Mini also support my Plex server along with Apple's Content Cache server, which caches downloads across on the devices for Apple SW updates along with iCloud and other services...

It does those services despite me also having two NAS boxes - one from QNAP and the other from Synology...

Yeah, running a Mac Mini is a bit of a luxury - but Mini's can be reasonably priced - for TM/Content Caching, you don't need the latest MacOS, so this opens up some options...

Here's a starter - I've done a number of buys from them, and they've always been good...

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