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Since installing unraid and replacing an older system I have been scouring the forums to find out how to get Apple TimeMachine working correctly with UnRAID. I have lots of issues with connecting to TimeMachine, errors in the back up or more recently that my Mac's keep telling me my backup disk has a new identity and needs to create a new backup, this taking about 24hours or so for the initial one and needing to redo it a few times a week is painful. Well from some help via this forum and YouTube I found a working solution to this. Its most definitely using disk shares instead of user shares that's the key. Here is how it got it working perfectly on my 2 Macs in my home. First you really should dedicate a single disk for this purpose as we will be using Disk Shares not user shares. Prep: _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ For my purpose I set all shares to exclude disk8 (5TB) to dedicate for my two Mac's (a Mac Mini with 2x1TB SSD's and a Macbook Air with 256GB of SSD space) I deleted my TimeMachine user share and made sure my disks shares were being exported on the Tower/Main screen. (v6.3.5) ---- Method of Procedure: with array stopped head to Settings-->Global Share Settings and make sure Enable Disk Shares is set to Yes, then start the array. Next I had about 2.5TB on the Drive so used the docker contain Krusader and ssh via terminal to move the contents to the appropriate folders on other disks. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Setup: Once the disk was empty it was time to set Timemachine up. Head over to the Shares tab, click on the disk# you are going to use and not a share name make sure Export is set to Yes (TimeMachine) and Security is Secure (TimeMachine wont backup to public shares/disks over a network) make sure to give your user read/write access Mount the Disk on your Mac with cmd-K then use type afp://username:password@serverIP/disk# and connect (in my case is used disk8) On your Mac: Open Preferences and TimeMachine connect to the disk you just mounted it should also be detected if you didn't mount it but I always mount it to know i can access it. Start a Backup once Timemachine accepts your disk and is scheduling a backup. I found my backup started but failed after about 20min or so. but i noticed I have a new Usershare named after my computers name with the .sparsebundle attached Resolving the Backup Error: _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Click on the new User Share with the .sparsebundle on its name. Change the Allocation Method to High Water I chose not to use the Cache drive as i only have 512GB and my initial backup was over 1TB but feel free to use it or turn it on after the initial backup completes. under the Security Settings leave it all as default Thats It both my Mac's connect and backup without error now and I couldn't be happier

The Archive drives have a 25GB non-shingled cache area. It all goes to crap when you fill that cache.

Faster for what? Parity is only involved in write operations and parity checks. For writes, the optimal parity you want high RPM, which today means 7200 RPM. The WD REDS have the slowest RPM of any drives - slower than the archives. So if speed is the issue, a move to the reds would be a step backwards. The HGST NAS, WD Red Pro, and Seagate Ironwolf drives are all 7200 RPM. But parity and data are working together on writes, and the gate is typically the slower one. So unless you have 7200 RPM data, a 7200 RPM parity is not that beneficial. A similar story for parity checks, which are gated by the slowest disk at that point in the check. Faster parity does help more with parallel writes. But these are still very slow and should be avoided when possible. The fastest parity would be SSD, but given that is not practical, the next fastest is RAID0. My parity is a RAID0 pair of 2 4T 7200 RPM drives. Which means my parity is virtually never the bottleneck in single writes, and helps the most is parallel writes. That's as good as it gets. Turning on turbo write is the best way to speed up writes, with the downside of having all disk spinning. But practically speaking, updating parity to get more speed is not going to be life altering, but you may get a modest little bump. @Lev recently went the RAID0 route and was pretty happy. I really like my RAID0 setup. Besides the modest did bump, it allows me to repurpose two older smaller disks for parity and buy a single new large disk for data and immediately have access to its full capacity. Most have to buy 2 of the new larger disks before seeing any advantage of the larger disk. RAID0 parity requires a hardware RAID card. The only ones I know work with unRaid are the ARECA brand.

As you likely know, the "really bad" slowdowns aren't because the drive has performance issues -- it's because the multiple random writes you're doing have hit the "wall" where the persistent cache on the shingled drive is full, and it has to come to a screeching halt while it moves data out of the cache. ANY non-shingled drive will eliminate this issue.

check out this thread https://forums.lime-technology.com/topic/61401-useful-pfsense-links/

Bummer - hope you can replace most of your data. Locking down ports is the right approach e.g. I only have 443 (letsencrypt), 444 (VPN) and 32400 (Plex) open inbound. Check out snort on pfsense for more extra security.

Thanks all for the suggestions (thanks @Frank1940 for the latest contribution) I was just logging in to post a new update (We did the local master stuff yesterday) ITS ALIVE! We have an old network attached device that sits all by itself, and never looked at and out of site out of mind. It had its own network address, but something in that device is playing havoc with the unraid server. Its a DIV-R video recorder for our security cameras. During isolation testing, when that network segment was unplugged, up came unraid, when plugged in, it collapsed again. I don't need the DIV-R on the network unless we want to look at footage, so its staying unplugged. I will hold my breath for a few days, however I think its licked - if I plug it back in - MAX disappears, if I unplug the DIV-R - MAX comes back up again.

Yes, pre-clearing the drives (including cache) and formatting the USB in another machine should completely clean the machine up. That said, you need to have a firewall up at all times. Are you at least behind a consumer level device (router, firewall, switch) while you are building? If so, make sure you don't have any ports open!

Can you make it without the XEON logo in the middle? Looks awesome. Cheers. Here ya go mate... hope I didn't overstep a boundary with @perhansen by taking the initiative to do this.