Saturday, March 26, 2016

Synology Time Machine backups: How to increase a user quota

After my Synology NAS updated itself to version 6 one of my Time Machine backups stopped working. It might have been coincidental. Time Machine claimed I only had 350GB free and it needed 1TB, but Synology claimed I had enough free space.

Whatever.

The fix was to increase the quota size for the user who owned the Time Machine disk image belonging to my MacBook Air.

Except I couldn’t do it. I could edit the user easily, but the quota information couldn’t be edited. Clicking on the row did nothing. 

Click-click.

Google helped. It’s a UI issue. There’s nothing in Synology’s UI to tell you to click specifically on the quota number. If you do that you can edit it.

It’s probably a good idea to turn Time Machine backup off while you’re doing this. In any case it’s fixed my problem.

2 comments:

Gertjan en Marielle said...

Dear John,

I quit using time-machine with my Synology 212j after it stated that my backup was corrupt and I had to start a new one. This happend every 2 to 3 months or so. I think it's a wifi stability issue (at least that is what I found on the web as most named cause). Did you ever encounter this problem?

Regards,

Gertjan

JGF said...

I haven't seen it yet, but I wouldn't be shocked. I used to run an Apple Time Capsule though, and I had to redo those every few months too. Time Machine backup tech is based on OS X "hard links"; it's a real technical hack. Someday it will switch to using the still-beta Apple File System and should become a lot more reliable.

Like most people who use Time Machine I also clone my primary systems once a day and rotate those backups. Time Machine is too unreliable to be my only backup.