Timemachine issues

[tatty27]

I have Timemachine backing up to a WD myCloud and it has been running fine for a month or so. For some reason the backup on my macbook pro has become painfully slow and erratic whereas my imac is backing up to the same drive just fine.

The backup on the macbook as gone from trying to backup 30 or 40 mbs as per usual to over 8gb for no apparent reason (no new software installed) and it gets as far as 38kb and goes back to 1kb. I stopped it and restarted it and it eventually seemed to start working again and after 4 hours got to 3gb and stuck. i restarted it and it has started all over again and is stuck on 4kb.

This is bonkers. I have checked there are no corrupt files in the trash (it's completely empty now) and nothing is running but nada.

has anyone else seen this behaviour? I don't think it's the myCloud because the imac's Timemachine is running fine.

 

[Brian33]

The WD myCloud is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, right? So it attaches to your local network using an Ethernet cable (or does it use WiFi?).

Here are things I would think about:
How does your iMac access your local network? Does it use an Ethernet cable while your MacBook uses WiFi? That might point to WiFi problems as the different TM results you get between the two.

What versions of OS X are you running on the iMac and on the MacBook? Sometimes newer versions of OS X make Time Machine stop working with other vendors' NAS devices (one of the downsides of the third party NAS), at least until the vendor updates the device firmware.

Hope that helps. Personally, I wouldn't use another vendor's NAS for Time Machine backups, as I've seen too many postings that seem to say "It was working fine, and then it just stopped working." (Using WD or another vendor storage for DAS (direct attached storage) is fine, though.) Apple doesn't claim (or "support") Time Machine working with any network drive except all Time Capsules and the newer ("tall") Airport Extreme devices.

Hopefully you can track down the problem, though. Then, I'd suggest you do a frequent check on the TM backup status to make certain they continue to work with the WD NAS.

 

[tatty27]

Thanks for that.

Both machines are running Yosemite 10.10.1 and the nas drive was purchased after Yosemite was installed. Unfortunately the macbook doesn't have an ethernet connection so I'm not able to test whether the wireless is to blame but I can't see how or why that would make the dramatic jump in backup size. I tend to use the Timemachine for system type files, anything else like docs, installation media etc etc gets dumped in my Dropbox folder which is excluded from the backup as are my parallels virtual machines.

I think you're right that the official Timecapsule is the right way to go. It's just after spending over £4k on a new imac, thunderbolt storage etc etc I was trying to save a little money but it seems it was a false economy.