Yosemite and Time Machine Failure with WD My Cloud

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

I’ve spent a few days trying to use a new 4TB WD My Cloud for use as my primary Time Machine Backup. After searching the WD forums, Apple forums and an attempt by Apple support I’m close to packing it up and returning it as it fails during the initial backup.  I’ve repeated the task 3 times with very similar symptoms:

Hardware:

  • iMac (27-inch, Late 2009)
  • Yosemite 10.10.1
  • WD My Cloud 4TB
  • Firmware v04.01.02-417
  • Both cabled to a TP-LINK Gigabit Switch

Task: Initial backup of 1.53TB

Sequence:

  • NAD mounted and connected as guest using afp. Time Machine dedicated ‘share’ selected for use by TM
  • Initial ‘Preparing Backup’ takes a few minutes.
  • First 90GB or so of backup works fine at anywhere between 6-40 MB/s
  • The backup stalls or slows to a few b/s (thats bits, nor Kb or Mb!)
  • No Time Machine Errors shown

I would very much welcome any thoughts on what to try to get this to work.

2

Hi cobble-it, welcome to the WD Community. When the backup transfer rate drops do you stop the Time Machine backup backup? On this case the problem could be with some corrupted files that the Mac if having problems reading. You could try to copy a file manually to the My Cloud to see if the same behavior repeats. 

3

Thanks for the comment.  I have let the backup run with no success, and have checked the original data for corrupted files.   It appears the problem might be that WD doesn’t implement the full Apple Standard for NAS and Time Machine ( https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/TimeMachineNetworkInterfaceSpecification/TimeMachineRequirements/TimeMachineRequirements.html)) , but I await a response from the WD Support Team with interest.

4

I’m replying to my own problem in case someone else finds it with a similar experience.  My thanks to the helpful comments I’ve had from the boards and WD Support.

My initial assessment of the problem was wrong - the backup wasn’t stalling, it was simply taking a very long time to progress when it hit a large number of small files.  After spending a couple of days with the System Log I have a reasonable idea of what has happened. After backing up 86GB of data (1785293 files) in 3 hours it then took 16 hours to back up a further 2GB (10.2% of job to 10.5% of job) (approx 500000 files in total or 3% of files per hour) and then completed the remaining 765GB in 12 hours.  Total files 8454638.

I am not using the WDMyCloud for external access, so am happy to use the Time Machine Share in a public mode as any attempt to mount the share with user/password was failing when TM tried to redo it.  (Just to avoid confusion I did have the user password enabled and full access for the user authorised in the share.)  WD had recommended the secure option, and also to mount using cifs://, but that didn’t work for me.

I attach a chart of the data I gathered below.

Backup Progress.png
Backup Progress.png666×412 34.9 KB

1 Like
5

Hi coble-it,

I experience exactly the same problem as you, under osx 10.10.3. The performance is so bad that I’m about to give up and return the drive, especially as it also takes down performance in other applications (e.g. disk utility) when the MyCloud is connected.

Tried everything:

  • upgrade to latest firmware

  • directly connecting iMac and MyCloud via ethernet cable

  • going through an airport extreme

  • going through a switch

  • replicating the setup that was performing well in the past, with an old timecapsule.

Nothing helps.