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WD My Cloud - Remote Time Machine Backups?

VirtualRain

VirtualRain

macrumors 603
Original poster
Aug 1, 2008
6,304
118
Vancouver, BC
I'm wondering if I can buy a WD My Cloud, install it at my daughter's house, and then backup the Macs at my house using time machine to it over the WAN?

Thus it would be an offsite backup (in addition to my own Time Capsule).

Is this possible?
 
not sure if it will work or not, but the speed will be pretty horrible, and it has the potential to make your home internet crawl. (if you max out the upload, your download speed will drop)

since mountain lion, OSX has the ability to use multiple time machine drives. get 2 drives, leave one at work, then every friday swap the 2 drives. that way at the worst, you are only a week behind.
 
Its an interesting marketing feature, Synology and Qnap offer similar features but WD seems to be better at getting the word out. Maybe its more feature rich as well, I'm not sure tbh

I'd say, you'll be limited to your home network speed and probably doing a round trip through the WD servers as well.

I'm not entirely sure how the WD My Cloud is set up but for Qnap- I need to setup an account at MyCloudNAS and configure the device to use that. I'd say its no replacement to dropbox (Qnap has a dropbox version of Qsync) or other cloud services at least for me.
 
TM backups are picky, any packet loss and there may be issues with corruption. Backing up TM to anything but an apple approved device is risky.

Think about using something like carbon copy cloner instead.
 
ColdCase said:
TM backups are picky, any packet loss and there may be issues with corruption. Backing up TM to anything but an apple approved device is risky.
Click to expand...

I disagree, I've used TM on my qnap NAS and also my drobo DAS, and both have restored files and never incurred any corruption issues.
 
waw74 said:
not sure if it will work or not, but the speed will be pretty horrible, and it has the potential to make your home internet crawl. (if you max out the upload, your download speed will drop)

since mountain lion, OSX has the ability to use multiple time machine drives. get 2 drives, leave one at work, then every friday swap the 2 drives. that way at the worst, you are only a week behind.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I agree about speed... TM backups are horribly slow even over my GigE or to a directly connected drive. Adding a WAN in between will probably have zero consequence on TM and vice-versa. If you've got high speed TM backups going on, I'd like to hear more.

As for two drive support for TM, I'm hoping to leverage that... One TM backup to my local TC, and another one simultaneously over the WAN to the WD My Cloud drive. Thus if my house burns down, I have an offsite TM backup. All automated without any manual workflow... At least that's the hope.

ColdCase said:
TM backups are picky, any packet loss and there may be issues with corruption. Backing up TM to anything but an apple approved device is risky.

Think about using something like carbon copy cloner instead.
Click to expand...

Hmm... That's an interesting potential wrinkle... Can anyone elaborate on this? I guess I could use something like CrashPlan which offers free backups to a friends computer over the WAN, but it would be much simpler and more elegant to just use native TM.
 
waw74 said:
not sure if it will work or not, but the speed will be pretty horrible, and it has the potential to make your home internet crawl. (if you max out the upload, your download speed will drop)

since mountain lion, OSX has the ability to use multiple time machine drives. get 2 drives, leave one at work, then every friday swap the 2 drives. that way at the worst, you are only a week behind.
Click to expand...

As long as you don't live in a third world nation and have symmetrical fiber. Upload not an issue.
 

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Doubt this will work or be reliable.

Better to supplement a first-line practice of Time Machine backups to at least two alternating external hard disks (either USB or via Time Capsule) with an online service like BackBlaze.

But any over-the-internet approach will be slow and will require many days for the initial backup.

Another worthwhile habit is to use your Dropbox folder (or similar service-- SugarSync, SpiderOak, Mega's upcoming sync app...) to house your current work. That way it's backed up in real-time.

Can't have too much backup, IMHO.
 
maflynn said:
I disagree, I've used TM on my qnap NAS and also my drobo DAS, and both have restored files and never incurred any corruption issues.
Click to expand...

The net is full of folks with disasters, you have been lucky. A DAS should be fine, its the NASs that are troublesome.
 
Menel said:
As long as you don't live in a third world nation and have symmetrical fiber. Upload not an issue.
Click to expand...

average peak US broadband download speed - 28.7 Mb/s, (read the part under the chart) or 8 Mb/s if you go by average.

i live in the middle of midtown manhattan, can't get fiber. not exactly 3rd world, and even now fiber isn't all that common outside major metroplitan areas.
I've got time warner cable, and pay extra for speed (think i'm on the 3rd of 4 available speeds).
I only average about 500 KB/s up (yes B not b)


VirtualRain said:
I'm not sure I agree about speed... TM backups are horribly slow even over my GigE or to a directly connected drive. Adding a WAN in between will probably have zero consequence on TM and vice-versa. If you've got high speed TM backups going on, I'd like to hear more.
Click to expand...

I use a linux box as a time machine (using netatalk), i get much faster than 500 KB/s write. I typically get about 15 MB/s on initial backup. (the only time i really pay attention to speed) so about 30 times the speed of my upload.

do a time machine backup, open activity monitor and check the speed. then do an online speed test, and check your results.
Remember that 1Byte = 8bit when comparing speeds.
Activity monitor will probably be B, but speedtest will be in b.
If you've got fiber, you might have enough bandwidth, but the average american connection probably will not.

I don't have one, but from comments on here, time machines (the physical hardware not the backup system) seem to be slow in general, even when used as a network drive, and not backup.
 
waw74 said:
I don't have one, but from comments on here, time machines (the physical hardware not the backup system) seem to be slow in general, even when used as a network drive, and not backup.
Click to expand...
I agree, the TimeCapsule is by no means a speed monster. But the hourly backups are incremental, so they finish within couple of minutes, usually. It serves it's purpose very well.
The full restore is a different story, obviously. On my MBP the number of files that needs to be restored is above 1Mio!
 
I get 80-110 MB/s backing up to a remote Mac Mini with Time Machine going to a pair of Thunderbolt RAIDs. Time Machine can be "fast", but the storage behind it has to be faster. Source drives are also RAIDs or SSDs.
 
VirtualRain said:
I'm wondering if I can buy a WD My Cloud, install it at my daughter's house, and then backup the Macs at my house using time machine to it over the WAN?

Thus it would be an offsite backup (in addition to my own Time Capsule).

Is this possible?
Click to expand...
Hi - I know you from the photography forum.
What did you end up doing here?
 
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