Time Machine Back-Up to Remote Disk

[smithdr]

Hi All:

I am attempting to back-up my MBP15 to a hard drive attached to a 2018 Mac Mini. Both Mac's are operating under MacOS 11.5.2. The remote hard drive is visible on the MBP15 and is mounted.

Sharing on the 2018 Mac Mini is configured with File Sharing On with Share Files as SMB and I am checked as the account holder. The remote hard drive has been configured in Sharing as "Read and Write" for Me, Staff and EveryOne.

Unfortunately, when I attempt to Time Machine I get a message that states "Looking for back-up" and the drive is ultimately not found.

This used to work. But it seems to me that when I updated my Macs to Big Sur in May of this year that this stopped working.

Can anyone give me direction on how to proceed?

Don

 

[Boyd01]

I have this working with external drives on a 2012 Mini server but found the setup very confusing. From what you've said, I think you missed step 8 where you must enable the 2018 Mini as a Time Machine Destination. See this:

Back up to a shared folder with Time Machine on Mac

On a Mac, share a folder that other Mac computers on your network can use for Time Machine backups.

support.apple.com

 

[smithdr]

Hi All,

I got it working. There are three choices after declaring a networked drive to be a Time Machine drive:

- Guest -- not this one
- Address. This populated automatically. And this the correct choice.
- Apple ID. This is what I had originally selected. But did not work.

I just wish I understood why it stopped working when I upgraded to Big Sur.

Don