Synology: Easy Time Machine integration

The recent release of Synology’s 2.2 beta firmware includes Time Machine support. For all Synology users, my tutorial OS X: Time Machine backup has now really become a piece of cake:

  1. Create a shared folder called “TimeMachine”
  2. Create a user called “TimeMachine” and assign a quota (typically twice as much as your Mac’s HDD
  3. Go to Diskstations Filesharing settings and select the “TimeMachine” shared folder in the drop-down:
  4. Click “OK” and then mount the volume on the Mac and you are done

Remember when you had to create sparsebundles? This is not required anymore, the Time Machine will automatically create this for you. I have archived off my old backup and started a fresh one and sofar testing looks good.

Tip: I have compared the speed when mounting the backup volume via smb:// (Samba) and afp:// (Apple File protocol). While smb runs at about 6-8MB/sec, AFP can push it to 11-12MB/sec (via a wireless link).