It’s a shame he’s dancing around the information because the review is only in print.
And also that he didn’t test for more than one initial backup and one update backup, so he didnt encounter the “looking for backup disk…” problem.
I’m having a bit more luck with the combination of TimeMachineEditor and ConnectMeNow.
Article is available Apple News+ FWIW. It was so techy, and as I already have a Synology, I skimmed through it.
I read the article in a newsagents whilst on the road. The top reviewing unit was an Asustor Drivestor 2 Pro AS3302T which was awarded 5/5 stars. The full article is here: MacFormat - 04/2022 - page 84
imgur mirror of article: https://imgur.com/gallery/j7bkJc1
In other news, my Time Machine backups to Synology NAS are faultless for me now with the combo of TimeMachineEditor and ConnectMeNow. Such a relief.
My Synology is so old it won’t get any more updates so nothing has changed there. So it occurred to me that perhaps macOS 12.3 fixed the problem? I don’t have the desire to risk breaking m y working setup by checking.
Hi Ivan. Many thanks for this article & apologies if this set-up has already been discussed in the Q&A thread: I am attaching my external drive to an old Time Capsule. So the external drive is doing the Time Machine backups, and the old Time Capsule is what connects to the router. Is this set-up sound? I’ve just bought a SanDisk Professional 6TB G-DRIVE, 7200 RPM Enterprise-Class to replace the WD My Passport drive I have been using (another story for another thread on the problem I was faced with this one).
Replying to Alan Forkosh re Asus routers. I have a ZenWiFi AC mesh and am trying to attach a hard drive to the USB port to use as Time Machine. However, (1) the Zen only ‘sees’ the drive when attached to the main node not the remote node, (2) the disk status does not give any details (see attached), and (3) the Asus Time Machine functionality doesn’t have a path to the drive.
Notably, if I attach an SSD it works fine but I am not going to spend the $$$$ for an SSD with sufficient capacity to backup my system.
Do you have any experience attaching a hard drive to Asus? Thank you.
Sorry, I haven’t actually played with attaching anything to the USB port.
Thanks. I can’t find anything on line other than connecting an SSD and the Asus help is pretty useless.
In case anyone is interested, Mike Bombich (Carbon Copy Cloner) finds NAS backups to be slower and less reliable:
Interesting. i can’t say I’ve ever noticed either of those things.
I backup over USB3 to a LaCie Rugged 1TB.
And network over Samba to a Synology 3TB drive.
Both are traditional spinning disks, not SSD.
OK, I know it is silly, but nice call on Time Machine backing up to the Tardis. 
Hahaha! Thanks. It seemed perfect many years ago and I haven’t grown bored of it.
In other news, I’m back to using standard Time Machine for NAS backups (no ConnectMeNow or TimeMachineEditor) so I do think whatever the “Looking for backup disk” issue was it has been resolved by a recent macOS update. Which with modern Apple is surprising!
I have had a few clients who experience disconnects or not-found issues with their Time Machine backup drives. Usually just re-pointing TM to the device corrects things. Worst case you do the full, manual “undo/re-do”: toggle TM off, unmount the drive, restart the Mac, re-mount the drive, re-assign drive to TM and toggle TM back on.
Excessive, but it usually clears things, at least for a while.
Super worst case is a new drive, of course. 
When this was an issue that dance gets boring fast and takes the automatic out of automatic backups!
I know this article is a year old, but it is very relevant to me right now. My AirPort Extreme 802.11ac (which hosts the TM backups for my household on a 6TB external drive) has gone unreliable, and since my “just in case of emergency” 2014 Mac mini is not only obsolete but is also flakey, I picked up a refurbished 2018 Mac mini to replace both devices (for a little over $400, which, given the dual-purpose of this replacement, addresses the cost-effectiveness issue that Ivan cited).
But I am running into a problem: After carefully following Apple’s simple directions for configuring the mini as a TM destination https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202784, I find that it does not accept the access credentials for any of the user accounts that work perfectly when logging into the mini directly.
In other words, when I manually mount the external (TM destination) drive from the Finder (after putting in login credentials), it mounts correctly. But when the same credentials are used within System Settings / General / Time Machine, they are rejected.
If anyone has any idea what I am doing wrong here, I would be most grateful.
carefully following Apple’s simple directions for configuring the mini as a TM destination https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202784, I find that it does not accept the access credentials for any of the user accounts that work perfectly when logging into the mini directly.
One of the reasons I eliminated TM over the network…with 2 different destination machines selected for alternating laptop backups…they random and inextricably fail despite all userids, numbers, shares, permissions, and passwords being the same…then the one that broke fixes itself with no action on my part and the other fails a few days later. Add in the .dmg instead of folders and I gave up. Set up rotating CCC clones which are finder readable…they mostly worked when I mounted the destination once, set up the job, and told the job to mount and I mount the destinations as needed. Still intermittent failures but fewer. Per either me thinking about it or maybe advice from Bombich…shifted the destination to the Remote Macintosh option with Safety Net enabled…and it just works.
Thank you for your perspective Neil. I also have CCC backups, but there are good reasons to have TM as well – not the least of which is ease of “turning back the clock” to recover an older copy of a file.
I just successfully did a Recovery using a Time Machine backup for an Intel iMac running Mojave. Also managed to migrate settings and data from a Macbook/Mojave to a Macbook Air M2/Ventura using another TM backup. In my book Time Machine is indispensable. My experiences are described here:
BTW - I also do CCC backups every few months.
The news of the Time Capsule’s demise may be somewhat premature. Mine’s (2TB) been in continuous use since I bought it when it first came out. It backs up 2 Macs. It was never 100% reliable, but the few times we’ve needed it, it was useful (not for mail - at least, not easily). Over the years I’ve occasionally had to repair it, erase it, remove and then reinstate it and such, but it still works as well as ever. I’m a belt-and-suspenders guy, so I also have a Time Machine on a fast external SSD over Lightning, which also contains a bootable clone, which I plug in every night; very fast. I also decided that I don’t need hourly backups, once a day (= night) is enough.
I’m aware that Time Capsules sometime die, and maybe I’ve been lucky, but before I’d quit on them I’d try to do whatever I could to keep them alive; it sometimes works. If not, then, of course, these other replacements need to come into play.
You could try mounting the Mini when you boot up the iMac (?) - add it to Account Login items. This might help Time Machine find the Mini with the backup files.
I have been remiss in following up with this thread. @mpainesyd, you are on the right track. To get the process started, I had to manually mount the share via SMB, and then got Time Machine going, After successfully inheriting the previous TM backup, it was no longer necessary to have the remote drive mounted in the Finder. The new/old (refurbished) Mac mini is working like a champ. That step (manually mounting the volume) is something I think Apple should include in their instructions.
There is one rub, however: The Mac mini itself cannot back up to that attached drive, Any attempt to use it comes with a warning that it will wipe out the contents of the drive (thereby killing the ability to use it as a remote TM backup for the other computers). I think the solution will be to create a new APFS volume on the external drive, and designate that as the TM backup for the Mac mini. That will be my experiment for later this week.
Thanks to all for the suggestions, and I promise to provide a more timely update with the results of this new experiment.
