EX4100 ability to save to attached drive broken

According to the documentation, an EX4100 can save (or even synchronize?) a partition to an external drive plugged into one of the USB ports. (Only the ones on the back, not on the front. Odd, that.)

But when I try that, there’s no Backup icon at the top of the pages implied by the documentation.

I don’t know if this is a long-term or recent problem; I only tried it the first time to day and had already updated from a fairly old firmware.

Backing up over the network is a really long process. :frowning:

Maybe this was replaced by the "“USB Backups” installed app? If so, it would be nice if the documentation was updated.

But I installed said app and configured it to copy a source folder to an attached USB drive. It thinks for a few seconds and then stops with:

Backup failed. Please check your system settings

The app itself doesn’t say anything about settings, so I have no idea which settings this refers to. The target drive is set as public, and the source is available to admin.

  1. Apparently the document showing the backup icon at the top of the page was the old OS 3 manual. Funny that online forms still direct you there as probable solutions for things.
  2. I missed the fine print that said EXFAT (I think that was the one) is only supported by the PR series. The reference to “your system settings” seems a might unhelpful.

But anyway, I have the backup working now.

One irritation: When the copy finishes I get a status that the job failed, and some files weren’t copied. But of course no way too tell which files weren’t copied.

Oh, and why some files weren’t copied, I had formatted the attached SSD as not case sensitive, and (I’m not sure how this happened) there were a directory on the NAS with a couple of instances of two files that differed only in the case of the extension. So both couldn’t be saved.

Hi @dwillcox,

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask