NAS connection problem in Catalina especially with Time Machine

I have a Western Digital MyCloud PR2100 NAS. It is a RAID 1 setup with each of two disks having 4 TB capacity. We have two (mine and my wife's) MacBook Pros using it for Time Machine backups and photo/Movie storage. It has been working just fine for almost 2 years. The Firmware is up to date (2.31.195).

My wife's MacBook it still using High Sierra and working just fine for accessing the drive in Finder and for running Time Machine in the automatic mode.

However, My MacBook I update to Catalina (including the 10.15.1 update) and is having problems...

After a reboot I go to Finder and in the sidebar select "MyCloudPR2100" and after a brief signing (password is stored) it shows the contents (as list of the "shares" as WD software names them, including "TimeMachineBackup") and backups start.... and using finder or Adobe Lightroom I can see and access the photos perfectly. However after some time things go bad.... If i don't actively connect to the photos (by having lightroom running) then the connection drops and I either need to reboot / reconnect OR I can use GO>Connect to Server, select the photos and then all is good, if rather annoying to keep doing that.

But the GO>Connect method doesn't work for Time Machine, I have to reboot and reconnect and then manual start "backup now"... It gets worse though, I just checked the NAS and the TimeMachine share has ballooned to 2.4 TB so now I"m not sure what its doing.

So I'd like help making the NAS connection not drop out and also what to do with the massive Time Machine sparse bundle...

thanks for helping