Backup failure in Time Machine to MyBook Studio

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I recently upgraded my iMac to High Sierra and since then backups using Time Machine have been sporadic - usually failing. Lots of endless “beachball” moments. I have run the Disk Utility “First Aid” and that failed. I suspect it is actually High Seirra that is the problem (and will post Apple), but has anyone found a solution to this? Is it a case of replacing a driver?

I have not been able to backup for over a week now and it’s becoming serious! I had to turn off auto update in Time Machine as it would stop everything until the beachball goes - 20 minutes at least.

2

My Book Studio failed in First Aid Test, indicates that there may be issue with the drive and recommend to take a backup of important data to prevent from data loss related issues.
However, you can also check the health of drive after the reboot of My Book Studio. If issue persists again, the drive may gone bad.

3

Hi,

This MyBook HD will not “mount” at all. So First Aid fails to read it or fix it. I therefore assume it has actually failed completely and will have to buy another drive.

Two questions:

  1. This is the second time I have had an external HD fails immediately after an upgrade of the Apple OS - is this a coincidence?

  2. How do I ensure that the data on this drive is not reclaimed by others when I throw it away? I am sure there is sensitive data on it that would be valuable to less honest people.

David.

4

Is the drive keep connected during the process of macOS update?

There may be some issue due to the update process and recommended to disconnect all external removable devices before the OS update process start in computer.
However, you can try to erase drive using WD Drive Utilities to low level format the drive.

5

Thanks for the advice, but the Hard Drive has been sent in for recycling. As it wouldn’t mount at all on any device (Apple, Microsoft and Linux tried) any attempt at to do a low level format ( or anything else) was pointless.

To answer your question on the High Sierra “upgrade” - the HD was disconnected from the iMac before the upgrade was done. This was in accordance with Apple’s own advice.

This doesn’t really solve the issue, but it does end it as far as I am concerned.

Thanks again for your assistance. You may wish to take this forward with Apple!