Since buying my MBL in January, I’ve been unable to make the thing work reliably with my Mac. Despite the promise of set-and-forget backup out-of-the-box, I just can’t get it to work properly. I’m still waiting for a response from WD Tech Support on how to get the thing to speed up to a timeframe that would deliver a back up within my lifetime (at one stage it was estimating >59k days…I managed to get it down after doing various tweaks found online, but then it bounced back to a mollases-like time-frame.
If WD is unable to address this, I’m wondering if anyone in the community using a mac and time machine can offer a solution – even if it means reconfiguring and wiping WD’s software – that would…
Allow me to continue to connect via router, so I’m able to back up via wifi or ethernet
Offers reasonable back up speeds (I’ve got a 3Tb MBL, which is supposed to service a MacBook Pro equipped with 1.25 Tb capacity.
Offers what’s likely to be a stable, straight-forward solution.
Any suggestions would be welcome with a sigh of relief!
Hi V. I actually wasn’t kidding about the >59,000 day estimate for it to complete a single backup. So, even if I was prepared to wait the >160 years, I’d need to be confident that my mac wouldn’t stack it in the interim (and that does run against the rationale of having a backup in the first place). Also, I just want a solution that works. Feels like WD should be clearly labeling these things “will not work with mac”, given the high number of mac users that have posted issues (I really wish I’d done a bit more online research before buying this, but the promise was so compelling. Hollow, it turned out, but compelling!)
So I’m really hopeful that someone out there’s found a workaround to reconfigure it so at the least the hardware is useable. I hate the idea of the 3Tb paperweight!
I continue to read about those with Macs having issues with Time Machine. Had my MBL for a year now and it works just fine with my macbook pro, both wirelessly and via ethernet. Initial backup did take ~10 hours but that is expected. Is the MBL the fastest backup for TM on macs? Not even close but I never had issues with days to backup. Have you tried to delete your TM backup or the TM share are did a rebuild?
Thanks for sharing your experience, whsbuss. Can I ask how you’ve configured your machine? One of the things I love about Time Machine is that for retrieving files, the interface is so easy and allows to see the various iterations a doc’s gone through. Does your configuration allow this? I’d not tried to deleting the TM builds as my worry is that doing so would put me back to square one. Do you do that by deleting the sparsebundle? You also ask about doing a “rebuild”, that’s not something I’ve tried or am familiar with. Is that a lighter option to deleting?
I’ve just gone to the doc on the WD site that guides through setting up TM and followed that again, deselecting the original disk and selected one that shows as “afp://MyBookLive/TimeMachine” Unfortunately it gets stuck “Looking for backup disk…” without ever finding it (despite ensuring that I’ve ticked the “Guest”, rather than dedicated user, as outlined in the instructions).
I noticed that the drive was already showing about half of the 3Tb as used up from the previous backup and a message “1.6 TB of 2.98 TB available”…would anyone out there know if the old file will simply get written over, or whether I have to go through some steps to manually delete it?
Very frustrating. And still no response to my initial query from WD.
Rsync is great for backups. But Apple’s TM provides for easy restoration since all backups are indexed. Got saved just a few weeks ago when my wife accidentally deleted some files… TM saved my bacon.
As to the bacon-saving, that’s why I’m keen on either maintaining TM or finding a configuration that has similar capability and user-friendly interface (years ago I found with an EMC product, while the features were great, the UI was so exasperating it effectively made most of the capability useless.
Thanks for attaching the doc outlining the steps. I did try using that yesterday, but have decided to try and delete all shares and try again (for some reason, the deletion keeps timing out…argh). Fingers crossed I’ll figure out a solution.
I’ve done a factory restore of the MBL, reset up the static IP and reset up the Time Machine configuration. The good news is that it’s found it and initiated a backup. The bad news is that it’s estimating 3 days to finish the first backup. Fingers crossed it manages to complete it and that subsequent to the first backup, it’ll run faster. It’s currently backing up at a rate of 1Gb every 10 minutes. (not sure what that translates into using standard scales).
Thanks to all for comments, advice and encouragement.
I’ve done a factory restore of the MBL, reset up the static IP and reset up the Time Machine configuration. The good news is that it’s found it and initiated a backup. The bad news is that it’s estimating 3 days to finish the first backup. Fingers crossed it manages to complete it and that subsequent to the first backup, it’ll run faster. It’s currently backing up at a rate of 1Gb every 10 minutes. (not sure what that translates into using standard scales).
Thanks to all for comments, advice and encouragement.
That sounds correct. The initial TM backup takes quite a long time depending on the backup size.
“That sounds correct. The initial TM backup takes quite a long time depending on the backup size.”
I’ve gone onto the community forums for my router (Netgear) to see if there’s any suggestions there for how i might tweak router settings. Still seems very slow, as I’ve got everything connected via ethernet.
The feedback I got from the Netgear community was that my lack of a gigabit switch was likely an issue. I went out today and picked one up, plugged it in according to the advice on the thread…and am getting exactly the same results. It’s estimating over 4 days to back up just over 500 GB of data.
A further issue that cropped up was that I’ve got just under 1.1 million items to backup. If I leave the machine running the entire day, it gets down to just above 1.0million items. But the next morning it goes back to square one and I never get below a million items…yet it increasingly creeps through the MBL memory (at one point before doing a factory reset of the drive, it had used up almost half of a 3 TB drive, with over a million items unbacked up!).
Your speed may be an issue, but if you also have wi-fi it’s entirely possible that you don’t see a speed difference because the Mac is routing on the wi-fi connection vs the Ethernet one. It’s all about which adapter is bound first… It’s a bad practice and fraught with issues to have a machine with two adapters bound to the same network.
Try disabling your wi-fi adapter if that’s the case and see what happens to speed. I’ve found a pure ethernet connection from any of my Mac’s to a WD Live will run at a rate of about just greater than 1gb per minute on gigE ethernet.
I use a Netgear R6300 router on my network. Its ethernet conected via LAN ports to MBL and Win7 PC. WAN port is connected to FiOS router on different subnet for Internet access. My MBP is wirelessly connected but when I create a new TM backup to MBL I connect it via ethernet and disable the WiFi on my MBP. Subsequent TM backups are done wirelessly. Is your Netgear a GB router?
Thanks for all the comments, questions and advice. I’ve actually managed to complete a full back up!
I posted onto the Netgear community forum and one of the hypotheses that came back was that it resolving the issue could be by putting in a gigabit switch. I picked one up, plugged it in and didn’t see any improvement in speeds (in fact it was estimating slightly more time to complete of 4 days). At that stage transfer speed remained at about 10 minutes per gig. Exasperated, I decided before heading to bed to set my sleep function to “never” and simply let my mac run 4 days straight.
When I woke up something had happened: the progress bar had zorched ahead and was estimating 4 hours left to complete the backup and it was taking about 75 seconds to backup a gig. No idea why this happened, but for once it was good news. The machine’s now fully backed up.
whsbuss, in answer to your question, the N300 WNR2000v2 isn’t a GB router, but I *think* the gigabit switch works, as it effects the transfer directly between the NAS and the mac. In any event, speeds were certainly orders of magnitude better once the switch was in place.
