I’d like to back up both my wife’s and my Macs to my My Cloud EX2 Ultra. On My Cloud I have set up the TimeMachine share, and adjusted the quota. Both Macs are now backing up to this share. The Problem is that my Mac is hogging all the quota space, which will soon fill up, leaving the other Mac with a poor backup history. Since MyCloud is designed to be a shared resource I am certain my problem is a common problem, but I have not see this problem addressed in Community posts, so I ask: Is there any way to set up multiple, separate TimeMachine shares, each with a separate quota? Or is there a way to set individual quotas on a single share for for multiple Macs?
Create separate private shares and separate users within your WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra, and assign specific permissions to each share. Then, connect as a Registered User in your Mac systems using the AFP protocol; one user on each system. This should enable separate shares for Time Machine.
If this does not work then perhaps it would be best to contact WD Support about this. You can do so over the phone or via E-mail.
Thank you Trancer. I’ll give this a try, and report back.
I looked in the WD MY Cloud EX2 Ultra docs and I could not find any specific instructions how to create a Time Machine visible “disk” from a specific user partition using afp. I also browsed this community forum, but found nothing specific. Can anyone give me instructions how how do do this?
Imo is the most simple solution:
- create a Share to be used/named ‘Time Machine’.
- assign in Settings that Share as specific for TM.
- on the Mac point to that Share within the TM prefs.
- Ayse any UserId/Password.
Puts all TM’s in the same Share. No problem.
Thanks TonVH. My apologies, that I did not explain very well the problem I was trying to solve. I did some further searching and have a solution.
Consistent with this community thread, I am trying to have two Time Machine quotas for two different Macs to back up, so one does not hog the space of the other, as is now happening with a shared, single Time Machine share.
Trance gave me the essence of the answer, but I needed to figure out how to enable the Apple File Protocol (afp) service on the Macs to connect to individual, specific shares on the My Cloud EX2, with a separate quotas, such that each appears as a unique disk in Time Machine on each Mac.
Using Finder, Go menu>Connect to Server dialog box, I entered the “Server Address” as:
afp://username@MyCloudEX2Ultra.local/usershare
Where “username” is the name of the user defined on the MyloudEX2Ultra device, and “usershare” the name of the specific share set up for Time Machine.
After waiting a short bit, the share is mounted as a shared disk on my Mac, and appears in the Time Machine settings as an available backup disk.
I could not find out how to embed the password in this string, but the Mac prompts for the password and offers to store it in the KeyChain for future use, so the password prompt won’t appear in the future.
So thanks TonVH and Trance. I hope others who want to back up more than one Mac to their My Cloud EX2 will find this useful.
