I think you're right about the flukey nature of this product. Let me tell my story...
After some consideration of the of the risks, as pointed out in this forum, I went and bought myself a My Book Live.
I installed it as per instructions (including using the Guest login, not Admin, as others advise here). I'm using ethernet for the initial backups, through a 10/100 Thomson router (not gigabit).
First up, all went well, as I backed up my iMac using Time Machine. Here's a chartwhich shows how it progressed. The backup progressed consistently at between 50 and 70 Mb/s, settling on 60Mb/s for most of the time. (That's about 27GB per hour, and the whole c. 400GB completed in less than 16 hours.) The red line on the chart shows the consistent way the time to complete fell as the backup progressed. I'm sure I could have done better with a gigabit switch, better cables etc, but that's manageable.
Second up, I backed up my wife's MacBook Pro. This story was completely different, as the chart shows. Only 108GB to backup so should be easy. However, the backup started at 24Mb/s, about a third of the previous rate. Okay, well it's a quarter of the size of the iMac backup, so maybe it will take about 10 or 12 hours? No, not at all, as each hour went by the speed got slower and the time to complete the remaining data (red line) blew out until it was 160 hours at the half way point! That is, it was going to take 1000% more time to complete half the backup than it was going to take to do the whole backup initially.
What's interesting is that the CPU was on the MacBook pro was never overloaded, only taking up 6-7% throughout. Although, of course, it could be the CPU in the My Book that's the block. Also, the peak transfer rate in the activity monitor was often at 7MB/s (say 60 Mb/s) or about where the previous backup was at consistently. However, there seemed to be long periods where little or no data was transferred.
There seems to be major issues, not just with My Book Live and Time Machine, but with Time Machine in general. As for the reasons here, I started with these error messages...
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro UserEventAgent[11]: com.apple.backupd-auto launchd job enabled
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro UserEventAgent[11]: com.apple.backupd-wake launchd job enabled
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro UserEventAgent[11]: com.apple.backupd-attach launchd job enabled
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro mds[61]: (Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:2 for volume
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Starting standard backup
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@MyBookLive.local/TimeMachine
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Mounted network destination at mountpoint: /Volumes/TimeMachine using URL: afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@MyBookLive.local/TimeMachine
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Creating disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/XXXX’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: diskimages-helper:
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: DI_kextDriveDisconnect returned 268435459 ((ipc/send) invalid destination port).
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Failed to hide extension on /Volumes/TimeMachine/XXXX’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle, error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4 "The file “XXXX’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle” doesn’t exist." UserInfo=0x109a20430 {NSURL=file://localhost/Volumes/TimeMachine/XXXX%E2%80%99s%20MacBook%20Pro.spar sebundle/, NSFilePath=/Volumes/TimeMachine/XXXX’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle, NSUnderlyingError=0x109a01e60 "The operation couldn’t be completed. No such file or directory"}.
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro fseventsd[17]: could not open <</Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd/fseventsd-uuid>> (No such file or directory)
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro fseventsd[17]: log dir: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 95ACD723-EAA7-4867-A63F-362553905EED
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Disk image /Volumes/TimeMachine/XXXX’s MacBook Pro.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Backup content size: 113.5 GB excluded items size: 5.6 GB for volume Macintosh HD
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: 129.57 GB required (including padding), 2.36 TB available
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro mds[61]: (Error) Volume: Could not find requested backup type:1 for volume
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]: Waiting for index to be ready (101)
The backup then began, with the 24Mb/s start. After about three hours of increasingly slower transfers, it then gave some more error messages. |
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro mds[61]: (/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/734EC8D6-7A26-476B-BC6F-70A9A774A529)(Error) IndexStore in bool setLocalizedAttributesLocked(datastore_info*, db_obj**, const __CFString**, const __CFDictionary**, CFIndex, StoreOptions, const __CFDictionary*, bool, bool, const __CFArray*):Error:7 setting field:com_apple_system_prefs_keywords for oid:466441
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro mds[61]: (/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/734EC8D6-7A26-476B-BC6F-70A9A774A529)(Error) IndexStore in bool setLocalizedAttributesLocked(datastore_info*, db_obj**, const __CFString**, const __CFDictionary**, CFIndex, StoreOptions, const __CFDictionary*, bool, bool, const __CFArray*):Error:7 setting field:com_apple_system_prefs_keywords for oid:470259
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro mds[61]: (/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/734EC8D6-7A26-476B-BC6F-70A9A774A529)(Error) IndexStore in bool setLocalizedAttributesLocked(datastore_info*, db_obj**, const __CFString**, const __CFDictionary**, CFIndex, StoreOptions, const __CFDictionary*, bool, bool, const __CFArray*):Error:7 setting field:com_apple_system_prefs_keywords for oid:471682
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro mds[61]: (/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/734EC8D6-7A26-476B-BC6F-70A9A774A529)(Error) IndexStore in bool setLocalizedAttributesLocked(datastore_info*, db_obj**, const __CFString**, const __CFDictionary**, CFIndex, StoreOptions, const __CFDictionary*, bool, bool, const __CFArray*):Error:7 setting field:com_apple_system_prefs_keywords for oid:472988
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro com.apple.backupd[720]
XXXXs-MacBook-Pro mds[61]: (/Volumes/Time Machine Backups/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/734EC8D6-7A26-476B-BC6F-70A9A774A529)(Error) IndexStore in bool setLocalizedAttributesLocked(datastore_info*, db_obj**, const __CFString**, const __CFDictionary**, CFIndex, StoreOptions, const __CFDictionary*, bool, bool, const __CFArray*):Error:7 setting field:com_apple_system_prefs_keywords for oid:476278
This appears to be problem with the indexing, but means nothing to me. Then the backup began again, and continued as before (see chart), and is still going two days later!
Any thoughts welcome, but not particularly hopefull given the many threads lacking solutions. Glad I've got SuperDuper as well!