Time Machine may have its critics, but for me it is great: set it and forget it, it generally Just Works! For many years used Time Machine to backup a couple of MacBooks to a Synology NAS. This was a very easy and satisfactory solution - backups could happen any time, just so long as the laptop was connected to my LAN, so one never had to think about Time Machine, and the laptops were well backed up so long as they were at home. In short, it Just Worked!
However, over time and later MacOS versions, I found an increasing problem with backups failing through lost network connections, until eventually the NAS became unviable as a Time Machine backup drive because no backup ever ran to completion.
My solution to this was to move the backups from the NAS to a drive attached to a MacMini running OSX Server - which had a facility to share disk space as Time Machine archives. Since setting this up, the problem of lost connections has completely gone away, and Time Machine has gone back to being something one never notices or thinks about - fit and forget, it Just Works!
So far so wonderful!
My problem is that the MacMini is running El Capitan, and is now overdue for upgrade to a later release (probably Mojave). However, I understand that OSX Server won’t work on Mojave, but the latest MacOS Server is a mere shadow of its former self. Specifically, It no longer supports space-sharing to Time Machine clients. So what is now the approved way to use Time Machine to backup to a networked drive?
