Wireless backups with Time Machine and Synology server

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I spent most of this past weekend (when not watching the NFL playoff games) trying to fix an issue that had been plaguing me for a few months now, but I was just too lazy to sit down and fix it. Since upgrading our wireless router to the D-Link DIR-655, I was unable to run automated backups wirelessly to my Synology server. Time Machine would always complain that it could not connect to the volume. What was odd was that it worked fine if I was connected to the network through Ethernet and I never had any issues on our older Netgear router that had significantly less customizable features. Even more confusing was that I could still access the shared folders on the same volume wirelessly without any problem. It was just the backups that were failing.

I’d tried using the power of the internet on a few different occasions trying to find a quick answer to the problem, but was never able to have any luck. After scouring a ton of message boards with a lot of other users running into the same issues with seemingly 0 possible fixes, I finally came to terms with the reality that I was going to have to go through every option in the router software one by one until I was able to get things to work.

Well, after doing that, I was finally able to get wireless backups running again. And since the answer was so easy and seemed to be so widely unanswered, I thought I would provide my solution here.

In the basic internet setup, under the DHCP settings, there is one tiny checkbox for Use Unicasting which defaults to being checked. If you read D-Link’s own help document, it says that this feature “is normally turned off”. Why it then defaults to being turned on is a mystery … likely a bug in the software. Simply unchecking this box and restarting the router magically made the Time Machine volume always appear as a shared drive on my computer and since that time, my Time Machine has been successfully backing up wirelessly. SWEET!

2 comments

Justin

My setup is fairly basic. I have a dual-bay Synology box that’s attached to our router and printer. For backups, Synology supports Time Machine for Macs, but for other OS’s you’ll have to set that up manually. That’s pretty much it.

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