Using Unraid for Time Machine

So, having killed my Proxmox install recently after a weird hardware failure I decided to move to Unraid just to try out something different. I’ll make another post at some point detailing some pros and cons for a regular home user like myself.

One of the things I was using the Proxmox machine for was hosting a FreeNAS VM that had a 10 TB external hard drive passed into it. Mostly it was used for backups of my main computers. Using Unraid I no longer need a separate OS to use as a NAS, though, as – like FreeNAS – it can act as both a file host and a host for other services. Proxmox was only designed to run containers and VMs. FreeNAS is designed to have jails and host files. Unraid is designed to do Docker containers, VMs, and host files. It’s nice for me because it’s one less VM I need to run and FreeNAS used a lot of CPU on Proxmox because FreeBSD just seems to not run with as few resources as Linux in VMs running on Linux.

The steps

Create a user

Go to the Users tab, then click Add User. This will be how you authenticate to the Time Machine share on the Mac later. I called my user time-machine and uploaded a user icon for it to make it easy to pick out later.

Prepare Samba

Add a share

On the Main tab, you should have at least an Array set up. In my case, I’m using a non-array disk that I had to add to a Pool. I named the Pool Stor in the picture above. If you don’t have one, you need at least an Array. It’s simple to set up assuming you have any storage devices on the machine. Once you verify you have either an array or a pool, you go to the Shares tab in Unraid and hit the Add Share button. Create the share, the name you choose here will be the name of the share you select on macOS.

Be sure to select the disks you want to use in “Included disk(s)” section.

Set security options on the share

For macOS to see the exported share as a Time Machine, it must have security enabled. After you’ve added the share, click it on the Shares tab in Unraid.

Change Export to Yes/Time Machine, and give the user you created Read/Write access.

Add Time Machine to macOS

Now, all that is left is to go to Settings -> Time Machine on a Mac, and assuming you’re on the same network as your Unraid machine you should see your Time Machine share when you click Select Disk

Wait

The first sync takes a while, but future backups are incremental and shouldn’t be intrusive to your network’s bandwidth – at least not nearly as much as the initial sync. That’s it. Once it’s done you can restore files to older versions or reinstall your OS using backups. For me, moving from FreeNAS to Unraid was a net positive. Less resources used and setting up the share was easier than on FreeNAS because it was just a checkbox for “enhanced Apple compatibility”.