WD Live and TimeMachine - irreconcilable differences

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

I have come to the conclusion that WD Live and TimeMachine just do not get along. I have recommended these to friends and family for a few years, but I suppose no more. I simply can not get it to work reliably.  No matter what I do, or how often I keep up with firmware, its the same issue: TimeMachine must create a new backup.

I have 3 Macs backing up to the WD Live via TimeMachine. Two do it wirelessly, one does it over Ethernet.  The two wireless are constantly telling me about corrupt sparsebundles, and the need to redo backups…this is about every other week.  Now, I get it, these things are all over the house, lids open and closed, so sure, TM gets confused.

But my other Mac, and iMac, doesnt have this problem. Its always connected, and connected over 100Mb Ethernet. But I just got the 6th request to ‘create a new backup’ on this machine alone, in last 6 months. Now, its taking 4 days, literally, to backup 150GB. Mathmatically, it should take about 4 hours to do this, over this speed link. Even if the hard drive were slower than the link, one day should be far more than enough. But 4 days? Something is very, very broken with this product.

I suppose I will have to retire this thing and get a TimeCapsule, as it seems WD just can’t figure this out. I simply can not waste anymore time on this, and can’t recommend these any longer. The fact that WD does not contribute here, and does not seem to even include fixes in the firmware for TM amazes me. (or it doesnt call out fixes in firmware)

2

I can feel your frustration. However, this is NOT a WD specific problem. Ever since a Mac OS update a while back, this is occuring for me, too, and my setup is a proper Apple Time Capsule on a 100% Apple network. So the problem is within Time Machine itself, and not related to the hardware. There are lots of threads on this (but alas no solutions) on Apples support forums and elsewhere.

I hope this will be resolved soon, because it is extremely frustrating. Actually, I have moved to an internet based, off-site backup for the time being, since I don’t trust my Time Machine backups anymore.

Hope this helps.

PS I don’t even own a WD drive yet, but I will receive my MBL tomorrow…

3

Hi, 

I have a V1 Time Machine and as I had 2 dead Hard Drives inside in 4 years, I decided to buy a MBL connected to the Capsule, wich is now working without any HD.

I also have 3 Macs wifi connected to the Capsule. 2 with Lion and the other one (a Hackintosh) with Snow Leopard.

Immediatly after installing Lion, I had the ‘corrupted backup’ issue with one Mac, so I had to backup again everything (2 years of backup erased, thank you Apple). At this moment, I had no MBL, the inside HD of the Capsule was still working.

After installing the MBL and corrected a lot of things (thank’s to this forum !and to the SSH connection) :

  • Lion Mac number 1 : The backup sometimes works, and sometimes it didn’t work

I saw the same issue with a Netgear NAS :  http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=59329

At this time, no solution for that

  • Lion Mac number 2 : I had the ‘corrupted backup’ issue last week after renaming the hard drive (not sure it was a great idea, but it may be a coincidence). The backup was on the MBL, 2 days for the new backup (200 Go)

  • Snow Leopard hackintosh : Never had any issue with Time Machine, everything works great.

I have read that Lion had introduced a Time Machine backup control routine. I’m not sure of the reliability of this add. So, it may be an Apple issue, maybe the next Lion update will fix this, or not…

The issue seems also only appear on wifi, so maybe there can be corrupted data (or interpreting as well) sending to the drive during the backup if the signal is not strength enough. 

So, It seems that there is no solution for this issues, except stop using Time Machine for the backups, wich is not very comfortable.

10.7.3 will be out in a few days, wait and see…

What WD is thinking about this issue ? Can WDTony or Bill_S talk to us about that ?