Has anyone been successful at completing a backup of a large share on the EX4 to an external hard drive connected to the EX4’s USB. I have never been able to complete a large backup. I am constantly told that the matter is being looked into but as of late I am not feeling confident.
Hello,
What firmware are you running on the unit?
Are you getting any specific error?
Really? None of you have been able to complete a 2TB or larger backup (EX4 to a USB attached drive)?
No Kudos ERmorel. Have you been able to omplete a backup as specified above?
For the record I have current firmware and on a replacement unit to try to resolve the issue to no avail.
WD has remote accessed multiple times and confirmed there is a problem and I have been advised that they are working on it.
Certainly not me.
It used to work - but was broken at the last two firmware revisions.
1 Like
I finally got the chance to do some more investagation on this issue. Thanks to all the attention that WD seems to be applying to this issue, it seems that we need to figure this stuff out ourselves.
In the other thread that I sarted on the firmware, I noted that the USB Drive I was attaching was NTFS format and that I would try formatting a volume with Linux “ext” format. Well I didn’t do this, but formated on my Mac instead (HFS+ format)
Setup the disk by attaching to a running EX4 device.
I configured and ran 2 simultaneous backup jobs with “top” running via SSH, and the GUI up via browser. When the rsynch jobs started (4) all CPU idle was gone, CPU load was spread evenly between “sys” and “usr” and the terminal session remained responsive, as did the GUI. Previoulsy there was very very little “usr” mode as “sys” was taking over 90%. Both backups ran and completed promptly (~50GB in 30 minutes).
So, I’ll continue some more work on it, but it looks as though, at least for me, the issue is the EX4’s ability to work with an NTFS volume via USB.
BTW, the NTFS volume had a “green” SMART status.
It’s all working well. Multiple backups (including removing and adding the disk) of >200GB undertaken in a timely fashion.
All working as per the brouchure. So my issue was purely down to the software not working with an external NTFS volume.
I would also note a “gotcha” here, you can set a slider to “Auto Start when Connected” from the backup screen pop-up. It is “ON” by default.
IF YOU DO THIS (or do not change it from default), be aware that ALL your backup jobs will then commence AT THE SAME TIME when your USB drive is connected. So you could easily get >10 rsynch jobs all hammering away when the USB drive is connected. None of which you may be aware of. It would be some sort of miracle if your GUI & USB remained responsive for some hours under this sort of load.
Bad human engineering - the slider should be “OFF” by defaut.
I have noticed that backup is working properly with a USB NTFS formatted drive. Perhaps NTFS is not the culprit then…?
Same… Not only did it fail, but I lost access to my drive for hours both through the dashboard and network.
