Problems with Wireless Back up using Time Machine and various External hard Drives

Is your profile out of date?? Are you on Yosemite.. rather than Lion??

Yosemite is sure problematic for Time Machine.

Let me note a few things.

1. Backups to non-Apple devices can be unreliable.. in exactly the way you have discovered. Even the USB on the Extreme Gen4 you have is not supported by apple although people sometimes get away with it.. there is something special about a TC.. or used to be!!

There is a long thread which I will dig up on how often TM needs to wipe and restart its backup on non-apple NAS etc.

Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.

2. Ethernet direct is much more difficult than you think to get working..

And if the backup already has issues it may simply not work.

3.

A Genius at my local Apple Store advised that the Western Digital product had probably become defective. I decided to buy a Time Capsule, assuming it would work better with Time Machine. However, the same problem is occurring after less than a week. Frustrating. It suggests that the fault is in the transmitter (the Mac Book Pro) instead of the receiver (either the WD My Book Live or new Time Capsule).

On yosemite I would say this is standard network issue.. not actually the TC or even TM.. although TM in Yosemite is also buggy.

Tell us a bit more.. The OS on the laptop??

How did you setup the TC into the network??

I do have a fairly long set of details on helping Yosemite.

Let me also just note from your title I was thinking external drives.. but it is important to realise the WD live is not external drive .. it is network drive.. this is important distinction.. for TM external drive is plugged directly into the computer (USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt for rich people) and tend to be much more reliable than network drives. TM backs up differently to external cf network drives.

I also would note that TM given the issues with Yosemite.. has now ceased to be sufficiently reliable to be sure of your backup.. I strongly recommend to people to buy an alternative.. eg Carbon Copy Cloner.. which works extremely well. It can produce a bootable clone to a USB drive. This gets you out of trouble in a few minutes if something actually fails in your mac.

It did not work dependably even when plugged directly to the Mac Book Pro, losing 'access to the disk' after shutting down the MBP overnight.

Ok.. let me work from here out.. because you do seem to be having the same issue on the TC.

It is most important that the MyBook Live does not change IP address. Please make sure when you plug it into the router that it has a static IP.. I am not sure how you doing the setup by static IP on the Mybook live itself or via dhcp.. but ensure it never changes.. by dhcp you do this by dhcp reservation.

See

With the reservation set the IP will not change.

Then open Finder and mount the disk manually.. using Go, Connect to Server in the top Finder menu.

Type in AFP://10.0.1.1

(replace with the actual IP of the MyBook Live or TC is identical).

You will be asked for the password to access the network resource.. type that in and save it in the keychain, so it is never lost.

This should help the network resource to always be available..

Now.. TM is another headache.. it will still manage to lose its backup or corrupt it if you do the backup to a My Book Live.. hopefully less often to the TC.. but it will still happen.

The other issue is how the TC is tied into the network.. in bridge you should do dhcp reservation on the main router.. whatever that is.. or use the TC with static IP which is a bit more complicated but will help.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5981989?answerId=25135547022#25135547022&ac_cid=tw123456#

very frustrating. TM works great with my WD 2TB Passport connected by USB to my Macbook Pro 2016. But could not complete one clean backup over home wifi network to a WD 4TB MyCloud drive.

now for the 4th time it is working and it says it is now backing up 4.2 MG out of 132GB (I know the entire backup is close to 200GB) so is it trying to complete earlier backup ??!?

Will wait to see if it ends the 132 GB.... previous times it sent me a message requesting to delete and restart a new backup.

I am trying last time before just ignoring the option of over the wifi backup to cloud.😠

previous times it sent me a message requesting to delete and restart a new backup.

Hopefully, this was NOT the message that you saw. Please confirm.

If you did see this message, your backups are unfortunately, corrupted.

indeed this is the ONE 😟

I am trying once more before giving up the WiFi option for backup to cloud - I do keep cloud backup on CrashPlan too 🙂

thanks for your speedy response!

Since you have been working with LaPastenague, I will let him deliver the bad news.

So... this is a screen shot does this meanI have a (partial) backup 49GB with 132 GB left to upload ?

It is never going to finish from the looks of it.

It has only done a tiny fraction of the backup.. 4.2MB of the 132GB according to the screenshot.

Since you have been working with LaPastenague, I will let him deliver the bad news.

Thanks Bob.. !!

The backup is clearly not working..

First of all did you upgrade the firmware of the MyCloud. Or at least check that it is the latest. WD has done a poor job of keeping up with the variations of protocol Apple have made. Even a firmware upgrade may not fix it. They used to work ok.. but of late it is too unreliable to bother with.

I recommend you delete the existing sparsebundle on the MyCloud and start again. This time use ethernet. If your macbook doesn't have ethernet as is common now buy a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter (assuming your MBP has thunderbolt still). This works really well and is fast. And the unit is small and cheap. (Cheapest thunderbolt gadget on the market).

Ethernet via your main router to the MyCloud.. it has to be gigabit.. then start the backup again. It should take 4-6 hours and you will see the progress if it is not managing that speed.. stop the backup and stop using the MyCloud.. it is simply not suitable for this job.

If it finishes.. then you can go back to using wireless for the incremental backups. It is so important though for the first backup to work properly as that is the basis of all the subsequent backups.

What wireless router are you using BTW??

Thanks Bob and LaPastenague

v04.04.02-105 is latest firmware of my WD 4TB mycloud.

My router is DLink provided by the local PTT provider.

By the way since last night my backup now is now 83GB out of 131GB so maybe in 10 hours this will be done - finers crossed 🙂

I did try Etherent hardwired with a Thunderbolt to the Ethernet data line input in the router including changing the IP to be one next to the Drive's IP - it was a bit faster but not that fast......

Will see 🙂

Thanks!!!!

Lucky me..... probably more than 30 hours later I managed to complete a 200 GB backup and this time no deleted file! I had 3 hours of suspense when backup finished but I HAD A MESSAGE OF "CLEANING UP" FOR WHAT SEEMS FOREVER... GOD KNOWS WHAT THERE WAS TO CLEN BUT NOW I DO HAVE A COMPLETE BACKUPP TIME MACHINE STORED IN THE CLOUD 🙂

thanks for all for your support.