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I have a QNAP TS-212 NAS running the latest 4.0.2 firmware. This firmware has a Backup Station option where it creates a Time Machine backup volume for OS X to use. In my case OS X 10.8.5.

When I enable Time Machine from OS X, I can actually see the backup volume called TMBackup in the list of volumes to choose.

However, selecting it, it tries to connect, and then tells me that the connection failed. I can connect to other AFP shares on the NAS without problem, but it won't connect to the TMBackup one.

What can I do to be able to make backups again?

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6 Answers 6

Reset to default
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I had the same problem with my new macbook pro running OSX Mavericks 10.9.1 and a QNAP TS-219P with firmware 4.0.2.

In the end I had to bypass the Time Machine GUI and set the backup volume through the command line using this command:

sudo tmutil setdestination -ap afp://[email protected]/TMBackup

where NAS.local is the network name of my QNAP. Once that way set the backups worked fine and the GUI responds properly also.

*** the afp:// part of the above command can just be used in the "Connect to Server" menu item from the Finder. I found that the use of the username "TimeMachine" made all the difference, given that I also use the same network server for my normal network shares.

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What I did and what surprisingly worked was forcing OS X to connect to the share once. Open up Terminal.app and enter the following, replacing qnap.local with your actual NAS hostname:

ssh TimeMachine@qnap.local

The problem is that the Time Machine volume needs to be accessed by a different user account, namely TimeMachine. It can access the NAS via SSH and AFP. The password is the one you set in the Backup Station control panel. Other shares might be guest-only or accessible from another user, but I believe that OS X refuses the connection to TMBackup entirely if it hasn't seen that machine yet.

You should be able to enter your password. Then you'll get kicked out again. After that, once you try to connect to the Time Machine volume from OS X' System Preferences, it works without problems.

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I had the same problem too with Yosemite and a QNAP HS-251 NAS with 4.1.3 firmware. None of these solutions worked for me.

I found an improvement based on Phil answer:

sudo tmutil setdestination afp://TimeMachine:yourpassword@yourIPaddress/TMBackup

where "TimeMachine" is the user, "yourpassword" is the TimeMachine password filled in the NAS interface, "yourIPaddress" the IP address of the NAS and "TMBackup" the display name.

The disk appeared magically in the Time Machine list and I can connect to it.

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  • This worked for me on QNAP TS-219P with a Macbook Pro running OS X El Capitan 10.11.2.
    – Wytze
    Feb 25, 2016 at 12:57
  • This works great. For me, the problem periodically returns when my router assigns a new address to the NAS. I could give the NAS a fixed IP but that causes all sorts of trouble.
    – Wytze
    Feb 19, 2017 at 14:17
  • Just use a DHCP reservation to ensure that your NAS always gets the same IP address from DHCP.
    – Craig Tullis
    Feb 17, 2019 at 6:42
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I had the same problem.

  • Open Finder.
  • Go to Connect to Server.
  • Type afp://<ip of NAS>
  • It will give you options to mount you NAS. Select it.
  • Then it will show in Time Machine. Select and connect.
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For user name use timemachine instead of TimeMachine, that solved the problem to me

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I had a lot of problems with this. None of the above solutions worked for me, although I think the problem was with the passwords.

If I used a long (64 chars) password I couldn't connect/mount in either Finder or Terminal. I got annoyed with the long password so just for troubleshooting, changed to a 4 char password. Terminal still failed, so did Finder - until I tried to connect with Finder using the following:

afp://timemachine:PASSWORD@SERVER(TimeMachine)._afpovertcp._tcp.local/TMBackup

Note:

  • Username is "timemachine" lowercase (even though in QNAP it's CamelCase)
  • PASSWORD is the password you set in the QNAP Backup Station and is optional but with it you can skip the login screen (just remember to delete the Finder connection history)
  • SERVER is the name of your server but leave "(TimeMachine)" and everything after that

After this succeeded, I went back to QNAP and changed my password to be 64 chars again. I repeated the above steps and it always failed. I changed to a 25 character password with no special characters (that might have been the real problem) and it worked again.

Results may vary.

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