Yup, Still having problems with my EX4. I had switched to CCC but that doesn’t work anymore (Yosemite). So I don’t know what to do anymore.
Same issue.
WD MyCloud EX2.
Both NAS > USB and USB > NAS. Smaller jobs would be done ok, yet as soon as it’s over 5GB, be sure there will be problems. There’s no error message or anything returned. The job starts and in a few seconds it just says ‘Cancel’ where the progress bar should have been.
Tell you the truth, one thign about MyCloud NAS – it really makes you concerned about software quality.
i have the same problem, the backup data USB to NAS doesn’t work.
after i created job, the dashboard in web base crashed many times.
I’ve had my WD My Cloud EX4 for about two weeks now. The NAS to USB does not work it self cancels. Also I cannot backup to a share I make within the EX4 neither. This has been a big disappointment since I use this for my small business.
WD support have been pretty much useless, offering very poor support. I’ve updated the firmware and this has not resolved the issue. Also considering that this unit was supposed to help me to backup safely and efficiently it does not provide an automatic programmable backup to an external USB device. You can only do this manually. Again a very poor solution. Has anyone else managed to resolve the issue, I am close to returning this unit as a defective product not fit for its purpose.
Not sure if anyone here has another NAS to backup to (Or a Linux PC) but I had a Seagate GoFlex 3tb. I used SSH to get into tthe Seagate drive and wrote a pretty basic shell script using rsync to backup the critical directories of my WD EX2. Unfortunately I cant run this from cron because I cant put my public key on the WD EX2 without compiling my own version of their firmware, thus I have to start it manually and answer the password request.
rsync -avzW -e ssh sshd@192.168.xxx.xxx:/mnt/HD/HD_a2/sourcedir/ /mnt/eSata/.users/admin/targetdir/
**EDIT**
If both drives are on your local LAN you can get higher throughput (Approximately 5X) by using the following options;
rsync -aPW --exclude=.wdmc --progress -e “ssh -T -c arcfour -o Compression=no -x” sshd@192.168.xxx.xxx:/mnt/HD/HD_a2/SOURCEDIR/ /mnt/eSata/.users/admin/TARGETDIR/
Obviously you would need to fill in the IP address with the IP of your WDNAS and change the source and target directory paths for your application.
I have had the exact same problem. I have been battling with it for months. WD support said that I have a defective device and that I need to have it replaced. As yet, I have not been motivated to bother about going down that path because there are so many complaints about the EX4 backup ability. Sorry that like so many of us you are having a bad experience with the EX4.
Thanks @Vertech1 for the SSH suggestion.
The software on this box is so nice that I almost forgot it was made for a network hard disk. I mean honestly when has a hardware manufacturer’s factory GUI ever worked 100% properly for a peripheral ever? I got the EX2 over the consumer-grade MyCloud because it has “pro” features… Root access is a pretty **bleep** good pro feature IMO.
I have a 1TB USB external drive I wanted to copy over to my new WD EX4 NAS. The USB to NAS “backup” feature in the admin GUI was totally useless, failed the first time and on subsequent tries, only copied the parent directory, not the contents.
(I have a hunch the issue is with the web-based admin’s directory picker. I checked the parent directory to copy but it didn’t seem to select the child directories. Might be the case that it won’t copy a directory that hasn’t been manually “checked” - for 1TB of data thats a lot of directories that would need to be manually selected.)
Anyhow it was really bugging me that I’d have to resort to copying it over the network considering this thing is a standalone linux server. Such a “duh” moment when I learned I can just pop open a terminal and sudo cp -rp the attached USB drive to the NAS and let it hum away in the corner while I go about my business
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I have the same problems.
My setup is:
Ex4 with 4x3tb as main storage.
An spare 3tb usb disk for extra safety
An older Netgear readynas with 4x2tb.
My need is to backup some folders in my EX4.
A Image folder that has some 150k photos and a videofolder with approx 100gb
Preferably I would like it to be copied to the usb with a incremential backup every day.
But there’s no schedule for usb copying.
I then choose to do the backup to my older netgear that has served me well.
I cannot start the copying since it complaints abut Rsync error.
And it seems that I cannot do a backup from my ex4 to another nas in my network.
The backup functions on this ex4 are redicilous bad and need to be fixed this instant.
Any tips on how to fix this?
I’ve had this problem for a few days, doing the NAS to USB backup. Upon reading this thread, I thought that the problem is with the EX4 backup process, so I tried doing the next best thing - I connected the external drive to my computer then tried copying data via ethernet knowing that it will take longer but at least my data will be backed up. Then the copy failed because some of the files (disk images) are greater than 4GB. I then remembered that I formatted my external drive using FAT, to be compatible with Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, that is the problem. So, I re-formatted my external drive to HFS+ and tried the NAS to USB backup job. This time around, it completed successfully.
Hope this helps the other users.
Thanks JTango,
I am using a Windows system, so I cannot format to HFS+.
WD have told me that I have a faulty system. The have sent me a replacement EX4, but I am still waiting for replacement drives. . . . . (and waiting and waiting).
I am hoping that the new system will not have the same problems.
AlphaBravo9, use NTFS instead of FAT32, if you are not yet using NTFS. At least that was the cause of the problem for me - the type of format I used. FAT32 cannot handle file sizes more than 4GB.
Anyway, if you are already using NTFS on your external drive, hopefully you’ll have better luck with the replacement EX4.
JTango,
Thanks for your comments.
I completely reformatted my external hard drive (NTFS). I tried a backup last night. It seemed to generally work. backed up 133GB out of the 135GB in the source drive. I think the missing files possibly had problems with the total path length on the destination drive. So I’m trying again with a shorter path.
It also appears that WD may have updated their backup utilities with one of their firmware updates. It looks and behaves slightly differently than it did a few months ago when I last tested it.
Here is for hoping that it’s all working now 
For me the solution was reducing the number of characters in the files/folder names. When it backs up i can see that it adds a lot more folders and characters to the pathway, causing my drive attached to the usb or even copying to windows fail. Would of helped if the error message gave some indication of this as the cause. So by shortening some folder names the safepoint was successful. Let me know if this works for you?
Actually I believe the issue is the timeout on the rsynch command for the WD backup implementation. I’ve found that with deep directories with lots of files that changing the WD timeout from 30 seconds to something greater (I use 300 seconds) is all that is required.
Alternatively, don’t specify the timeout as all (as a timeout of 0 means no timeout).
I haven’t had the time to figure out how to make the change permanent, so manually copy the command and modify it interactively.
same issues…i have reading all posts since 2014…same issue with a variance. It does not work.
I have contacts with Support Center, but they cannot help out the design issue which is left. All set-up / configuration has been doble checked with assistance of Help Desk.
my parent HD gets “eaten up” in storage place and my Trash Can show a lot of system files, I guess expelled by WD software when letting WD-sync do its job. when restarting my Mac’s all of them have problems in shutting down and takes longer time after my WD software has been installed. - there seems to be compatibility problems with WD software on Mac computers. in the past i lost all my back-up data on WD drives after OSX updates - two times!!
i have sent diagnostic reports to Technical Center - I will wait 7 working days for their solution. if not solving the issue? I will return my WD MyCloud Mirror 2nd Gen 8TB and My Passport for Mac 3TB
