Slow and full Time Machine backups to QNAP NAS on MacBook Pro running macOS Tahoe 26.1

Hi all,

MacBook Pro running macOS Tahoe 26.1 and connected via ethernet to a QNAP NAS (QuTS Hero. I have a dedicated Time Machine folder and user set up on the NAS.

Time Machine was working just fine backing up to the NAS (as well as directly connected USB drives) until recently, maybe until 2-ish months ago. Then, at some point, the NAS folder filled up. I erased it, unmounted, and remounted the folder and set Time Machine off to back up.

Now, Time Machine is taking forever to back up and of the two backups that have completed, it has performed complete backups instead of incremental backups. And consequently, almost completely filled the NAS folder.

I tried changing the IO throttle setting in terminal, with little to no impact to the backup speed.

Looking in Console there are a lot of entries as follows:

default 12:17:47.217876-0500 TimeMachineSettings [] activating connection: mach=true listener=false peer=false name=com.apple.backupd.session.xpc

default 12:17:47.218066-0500 backupd [] activating connection: mach=false listener=false peer=true name=com.apple.backupd.session.xpc.peer[6417].

default 12:17:47.218580-0500 TimeMachineSettings [] invalidated because the current process cancelled the connection by calling xpc_connection_cancel()

default 12:17:47.218606-0500 backupd [] invalidated because the client process (pid 6417) either cancelled the connection or exited

Not sure this is related to the slow down, but seems relevant.

Any suggestions for tracking down the full backup every time issue or the speed of backup are appreciated.

Spoke with Apple Support yesterday and they do not provide support for backing up to network drives using Time Machine apparently.

Thanks in advance,

-Randy

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: MacBook Pro Time Machine