Acronis True Image 2016 reports a connection failure when trying to establish an FTP connection with a Gen2 MyCloud FTP server. A connection is actually established, but Acronis does not like something it sees. A WD tech worked with me on the phone for over an hour and we briefly got it working - long enough to end the phone call. The tech could not explain how he got it working. I want to either understand why some of the following actions were needed, or to verify that they did not actually solve the problem. (None of these were needed to get connections to a MyBookLive FTP server.)
The tech verified SSH was enabled. (I already had it enabled because I thought it might be needed for debugging. I don’t want to keep it on.)
He enabled port forwarding for ports 20 & 21 on the server.
He enabled port forwarding on my router and added the MyCloud ports 20 & 21 to the port forwarding list. He later cleared the port forwarding list but left the function enabled.
He enabled UPnP support on the router, but turned it off before we got to a successful test.
As far as I know, the only thing I did between the successful test and the next failure was disable port forwarding on the router and turn off SSH on MyCloud. I’ve since turned them back on to no avail.
I have no desire to get at the server from the web. I don’t want ports 20 and 21 on MyCloud accessible from anything other than 3 PCs on my LAN. Are any of these things listed above actually needed?
I’m beginning to think this is an Acronis problem, but I want to make sure I’m not missing something on my MyCloud.
Generally if you are on the local network, there is no reason to use port forwarding for ftp or ssh access.
Port forwarding is generally used to open up holes in the router firewall. All this assumes the computer and my Clouus in the same up address pool and the router is not isolating LAN clients or isolating the wifi network if the computer is connected wirelessly.
If you haven’t done so already you should test ftp access to the My Cloud using an ftp client software like Filezilla.
I speculated in you other thread that I thought Acronis was the problem not the My Cloud.
Edit to add: why use ftp in the first place? Why isn’t that Acronis software connecting to the My Cloud using Smb like windows file explorer does? I use an older version of true image and it does not use ftp (afaik) to access the My Cloud.
FileZilla and my browser (Firefox) have to trouble getting to the server (and to the correct directory on the server).
My primary reason for using FTP is that I want a repository that is pretty much inaccessible by ransomware - one TCP connection between the backup software and the server - unusable by anything else running on the PC unless that something has the correct userid and password. Smb just makes the NAS share an extension to a user’s local drive(s) - accessible by anything running under user’s id.
In addition, Windows (and maybe other operating systems) has this stupid restriction that a user can have only one Smb connection to a server - only one set of network credentials for any user/server pair. And once that connection is open it stays open until the user logs off. That means the user cannot even sequentially access private shares with different credentials (on the same server). Public shares or a set of private shares that use the same credentials. No exceptions.
I can probably come up with other reasons to not use Smb, but those are the primary ones.
Belated status report:
I opened a problem case with WD, got it escalated, and finally worked with a technician. I gave him remote access to my PC and we worked on this problem for about an hour. He finally got it working although he could not explain how. It worked long enough to take 2 backups - a short test and a full backup of one of my PCs. Then it went back to it’s old behavior.
I did not re-open the problem ticket because I cannot guarantee I did not break it. The tech had me make some changes like setting up port forwarding for the FTP ports on both the MyCloud device and on my router. I want this device isolated from the web. I doubt that was causing the failure, but if getting the FTP connection between Actonis and the NAS working requires enabling port forwarding, I’ll accept failure. (Just as a test, I briefly turned those features back on but could not ever get the FTP connection to work again.)
At this point I have given up. I’m doing FTP backups to MyBookLive (which works fine) and then SafePointing to the MyCloud. In the future I’ll use some FTP client like WinSCP to copy local Acronis backups to the MyCloud FTP server.
I’m still very puzzled that it did work for a short time, but I’m not losing sleep over it.
