It was always breaking on my Synology too. I ended up just attaching an 8TB spinning rust directly to the Mac and it's been flawless since.

Time Machine really doesn't like using remote disks that aren't official Apple gear.

Even when I had an Apple Time Capsule, it would break about once a year. It's just a flakey system. Wish they'd add the equivalent of zsend to APFS instead of using the weird "gigantic sparse disk image with hard links in it" system

When backing up to an APFS Time Machine volume it does work a bit like that, at least no hard links are used any more:

- https://eclecticlight.co/2021/03/11/time-machine-to-apfs-und...

- https://eclecticlight.co/2021/04/16/time-machine-to-apfs-usi...

Oh awesome! I guess I need to delete and re-create my Time Machine backup to enable this.

Ditto. Once I bothered to set up Borg for my other boxes, it was overall much less pain to just use it on macOS too.

FWIW Apple has deprecated AFP/AppleTalk and you should disable it on the Synology. It's far more stable with SMB (but still not great)