I’ve been setting up my new MyCloud 4TB, and want to store backups from two computers.
After trying a bunch of stuff, I discovered this thread, which implies that you can only have one time machine share on mycloud, and all computers have to share that. I don’t want to do that, because according to Pondini, the backups are all mixed up and if you later want to copy or remove the backups from one computer, you can’t get them untangled.
Before I started, while googling around, I saw that you could set up multiple time machine shares — just set up a share and go into Settings/General/MacBackups/Configure and enable it for time machine. I’ve been trying to do that and it’s a real mess.
Is it supposed to work? Here’s what has happened so far:
I set up a share with the name “MyComputerTimeMachine” and made sure it was visible in Settings/General/MacBackups/Configure (I didn’t change the Maximum Size slider yet per advice). I backed up MyComputer to the share just fine (took about 25 hours for 1TB on a GB ethernet connection — faster would be nice but I guess that’s acceptable: almost the same backup was done the night before on USB 3.0 in 6 hours).
So that’s OK. Then I had a time machine backup from a defunct machine I wanted to have online for archiving. I created a new share called “OldComputerTimeMachine” and copied the backup according to Pondini’s instructions.
Worked fine. I was able to Option-Click on the Time Machine menu bar item on MyComputer and select “Browse other disks” and find the old computer backup and browse it.
Then I went back into Settings/General/MacBackups/Configure and set the maximum size for MyComputer to 2.5TB and the maximum size for OldComputer to 200GB. So far so good.
Then I created another share for HerComputerTimeMachine. After that I couldn’t get a backup started on MyComputer. I got the message:
Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup to “WDMyCloud”. The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features.
Checking the MyCloud dashboard, the maximum size for all three shares was reset to 0KB (100%)!
After shutting down MyComputer and MyCloud, and restarting MyCloud, I decided to try to backup to “HerComputerTimeMachine” on HerComputer. I was able to select the share and start the backup.
Then trying to backup also on MyComputer, Time Machine complained “Backup Disk not available.”
So I stopped the backup on HerComputer, waited a while and tried to backup MyComputer again.
Then I got the message again:
Time Machine couldn’t complete the backup to “WDMyCloud”. The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features
When I investigated by looking at what was in the shares, I got an error when I try to mount the MyComputer share, and I found that MyComputer.sparsebundle had been moved to the OldComputer Share! And the OldComputer.sparsebundle had just disappeared!
What a mess! Is this supposed to work?
