I know safepoint can backup the entire drive to a usb drive however is there anyway I can just backup or even just move the contents of a share across to a device connected via usb?
Well yes, you can use the WDmyCloud desktop app to send a copy/move command to the NAS from a core share to the USB share, or you could use Windows/Finder file explorer to move the files (in this case, the data is roundtripping across the wire, but it is easier to use).
Tried that with my mac and it’s transferring at 1mb/s which is pathetic. Never had much luck with Nas speeds when using the mac. Was hoping I could use ssh or ftp so it didn’t have to go through my pc.
Wouldn’t happen to know if I took the drive out of the mycloud and connected it directly to a linux system would I be able to see the shares and copy them directly.
The mycould runs linux so if you are comfortable with that you can copy the files with ssh
the mycloud desktop app is easier and should be almost as fast
Wormvortex wrote:
I know safepoint can backup the entire drive to a usb drive however is there anyway I can just backup or even just move the contents of a share across to a device connected via usb?
There is another way that may be closer to what you’re looking for (or not…). Rather than telling the safepoint to backup specific shares, you can tell it to *exclude* the ones you don’t want. You do this by amending the exclusions file that rsync respects. WD already has an exclusions list, you just have to add a couple lines to it. That exclusions list is here:
/etc/nas/NSPT/exclude.txt
You need to be a little familiar with rsync and how it interprets paths on that list–they are relative paths, not absolute ones. But here’s a shortcut. If you have 3 shares, called “Manny,” “Moe,” and “Jack,” and you want the safepoint to back up only Moe, you let rsync know that you want to exclude Manny and Jack. Open that “exclude.txt” file and add these 2 lines:
/Manny/
/Jack/
With slashes on either side you are telling rsync to ignore those volumes, but at the same time *not* to ignore any individual files and/or directories named Manny or Jack that might lie somewhere deep inside Moe’s filesystem, which you want to preserve. For more complicated exclusions, check in with the interwebs and study the rsync exclusions syntax because it can be tricky. Note that this will preserve (I believe) all the rest of the system stuff, in addition to that one share, which may or may not be a plus for you. But it’s a nice solution to keep just that one share backed up automatically.
FYI, transfer rates on my Mac (latest Mavericks version, latest v4 firmware on the NAS) are great. I’ve disabled the wdmcserver and wdphotodbmerger daemons, made sure the CNID DBs were clean so Netatalk could run smoothly, and mounted shares exclusively using AFP (switching between filing protocols can corrupt the databases that make the AFP implentation on the NAS fast). I’ve gotten great results. As it happens my My Cloud is making a safepoint to an older attached USB 2.0, and transferring at a very consistent 12 MB/sec. Given that’s USB 2.0, I’m happy with that. Here’s the screenshot. The 3 samples show iostat output averaged over 10 seconds each (iostat -m 10). %iowait is a constant +/- 10%. I’ll take it. Transfers to/from the NAS itself over wired gigabit Ethernet are much, much faster. The My Cloud performs great with Macs. It’s just that WD are really terrible at communicating with owners and explaining in the documentation how to keep performance optimal. So it’s no wonder that so many people have a crappy experience.
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pinax, thank you for the explanation on excluding shares, which I’ve used successfully to exclude the Time Machine share.  My question is, “How do you change the reported/expected size of the safepoint?”.
If I attach a USB drive smaller than the space used on the MyCloud, I get the message:
- Your safepoint cannot be updated due to insufficient space. Please make sure you have sufficient space on your destination device and/or shares, and try again. (36327)
I want to use a bachup USB drive that is smaller than the 2TB My Cloud, because, after excluding the Time Machine share, I only need to backup about 50GB, and I have a spare 500GB external USB drive I want to attach to the MyCloud.  [I’ve tested safepoint with a separate 2TB USB drive and that works fine (i.e. the safepoint completes okay and only backs up the shares I wanted).]
But safepoint won’t let me use a drive smaller than it’s expected or estimated  safepoint size, even though the actual backup will only be much smaller.
Before doing a safepoint, the MyCloud believes the size of the backup will be (say) 700GB because it includes the excluded Time Machine share in its estimate  of the safepoint size.  In fact, the actual backup is only about 50GB, and, of course, because of the exclude.txt amendments, it only backs up the 50GB I wanted, but thinks it has backed up 700GB.  Is there an SSH fix that can change where safepoint/rsync gets its estimate of the safepoint size?
Thanks for your help.
Hello,
I’ve excatly same issue, I’ve excluded the shares and trieed to backup my 1TB usb (My Nas is 3TB) and got yhe insufficient space error. The backup size after exculuding about 400GB. Can you please help me to fix it? Thanks…
