I use the MyCloud 2T as the target for several home PC’s to backup to. I’d like to use the Safepoint feature to create multiple backups to be rotated off site. I have purchased:
Three 2TB drives
A two bay USB-SATA dock with cloning feature.
I made my first Safepoint backup (entitled Safepoint_A) to Drive 1, without incident. In an effort to save time I then used the dock to clone Drive 1, removed it, and inserted Drive 2. It all looked good until I tried to update Safepoint_A, at which time the MyCloud reported there was an error with the safepoint (and recommended updating LOL).
I then tried creating a new safepoint called (very creatively) Safepoint_B and writing it to Drive 2. It did not like that at all, and now I can neither use or delete Safepoint B. I tried deleting Safepoint_B, unsuccessfully. And since I reformatted Drive 2, SP_B no longer shows in the list, but if I try and use that name it complains that it’s in use.
Ultimately, it appears that I will need to reformat all three drives, create three unique safepoints, and perform three full backups to get this process started. Very disheartening since this was test to see if I wanted to expand it to 12 months off site.
Any Safepoint experts out there who can school me on how they work and what I’m doing wrong? Would I be better off to get a hotplug bay for my windows machine and write Safepoints to it as a NAS share?
Update: I just noticed that MyCloud now thinks the USB dock is using 1.3TB (correct) or 6TB when there are two 2T drives mounted, and 4TB when there is one drive mounted.
Update 2: With only Drive 1 mounted the MyCloud no longer sees any safepoints. Placing that same drive/dock into a windows box shows that the Safepoint originally created remains intact and contains all the data.
It appears that WD MyCloud does not handle multi drive USB devices and/or docks well at all.
The particular setup you are currently trying has not been tested for USB Safepoints as the unit expects for the same USB device to remain connected, this includes driver and firmware signatures from the unit within the enclosure. I’d recommend using an external process to clone the Safepoint into a different unit without swapping/exchanging hard drives.
The drives are all identical, and cloned. There is zero reason it should
not work.
That said, expecting the same physical unit makes this feature absolutely
useless for making off site backups. Or even backups for that matter,
because a 2nd volume mounted to the same host isn’t a backup.
Its possible the Safepoint it tied to the drive serial number or something along those lines. And that is what causes it to fail if you copy/clone the Safepoint to another hard drive. One way to check if its the drive or the enclosure/docking station is to use a single bay type USB enclosure if you have one and swap the drives in the single bay enclosure rather than the two bay dock.
