Trouble using Buffalo LS210 NAS disk with time machine

joehg wrote:

Contacted Buffalo support. Agent said the LS210 doesn't work on Tahoe26. They are working on a software upgrade for the 200 series. He said to return it and get the 700 series which already has the fix.

Thanks for the follow up.

Apple dropped AFP completely in Sequoia/Tahoe, and Time Machine now only works over SMB with proper SMB3 support and enhanced signing. Many older NAS drives (including some Buffalo LS210 models) use outdated SMB stacks that don’t fully meet Apple’s current Time Machine specs.

You can check this by opening Terminal and running smbutil statshares -a to see if the drive reports Signing On and Encrypt On, if not, Time Machine won’t detect it.

Try updating your NAS firmware or, if unsupported, manually create a sparsebundle disk image on the NAS and point Time Machine to that instead.

There are multiple posts on this forum of people having issues with their existing TM backup to a NAS (Synology & QNAP). Some have discovered their problem was due to non-ASCII characters in the name.

Timemachine Back-up in MacOS 26 (Tahoe) d… - Apple Community

You should check with Buffalo support to see if there are any software or firmware updates for your NAS (even if it is brand new).

1) Note that TM should have its own volume on the NAS. If you intend to use the full capacity as your backup, that's fine but if you want to use less and reserve some for other uses, set up multiple volumes per the manufacturer's instructions. If the NAS offers the ability to encrypt the backup, do not use that option – let TM handle the encryption. (Personally, I have a 2x10 GB NAS set up with 6 volumes, 5 for TM backups of 5 different Macs and one as a general file share.)

2) Once you have the volume intended for TM backup mounted, go to System Settings > General > Time Machine, click the (+) button at the bottom of the list, select the destination from the popup window then select Set Up Disk.