*FIXED* Time Machine speeds - Want to ensure I'm maximizing

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
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I’m sorry for yet another Time Machine performance thread.  I just wanted to make sure I was getting the most performance I could.  Sorry for all the info, but I figured it would be better to have to much than not enough.  :wink:

I recently purchased the 4TB My Cloud.  I immediately upgraded it to the latest firmware, which after reading that some people were happier on earlier firmware, may or may not have been a mistake.  My goal is automatic wireless backups of my late 2013 Retina Macbook Pro and my wife’s late 2009 Macbook.  She’s backing about 225GB from her internal SSD that I upgraded it to.  I need to backup at about 1.5TB total.  My internal SSD has around 275 GB and the rest is on a 2TB USB 3.0 WD Passport.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that my router didn’t have a gigabit switch until I purchased this.  :cry:  I understand that it’s going to be painfully slow going that route.  For kicks I started out trying to do a backup of everything on mine at once but quicky realized that wasn’t going to work.

Since my wife’s had an ethernet port, I shut down the drive, connected it directly to the laptop, then pulled the plug on the drive and plugged it back in.  I was able to backup my wife’s 225GB in 12 ish hours or so, I forget exactly, but I felt it was reasonable.

I’ve had a tougher time with mine, since it has no built in ethernet port.  I finally did as some recommended and excluded everything but my documents folder for the first backup, and gradually added more and more until I got my entire internal backed up.  Now I’ve moved on to the external, which is two folders, Pictures and the other Videos, both of which are around 550GB or so.  I’m currently backing up the Videos folder.  I started it around a week ago and completed about 325GB in that time.  Yesterday I broke down and bought the Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter in hopes of speeding up the initial backup.  Over wifi, I was seeing 3-6 MBs write speeds.  With the adapter, I’m seeing around 36 MBs.  Much faster, but I just want to ensure that’s the fastest.  I know a lot of people have seen Lon’s videos about the drive, and he gets about 46 Mbs in his:

https://youtu.be/siwyaneWJJc?t=2m9s

That’s not a lot faster, but another 10 MBs is a lot when you’re trying to eke out every little bit of speed.  I know all networks are different, have different overhead, etc., but since this is just the drive connected directly to the laptop via the Cat 5e cable included with the drive, could something be hampering it?  I spoke with support last night and they said I should be seeing faster speeds than that, potentially more like 80 MBs write, but that was tested via a Windows 8 machine and using a Cat 6 ethernet cable, and that Macs usually run at the speeds that I’m seeing.  They also tried blaming it on the Thunderbolt adapter, but I switched over to my wife’s built-in gigabit ethernet port and saw the same speeds.  Would Cat 6 help?

I resumed the Time Machine backup at 10:14pm last night, this time over ethernet.  It ran a scan and found 207.33 GB (184.61 plus padding) still needed to be backed up at 10:17pm.  As of this morning it had only done 23.22 GB.  That sounds more like what I was seeing over wifi.  I’ve seen others on here saying they could get around a GB a minute, like at the bottom of this post:

  http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/Time-Machine-backup-how-slow-is-quot-slow-quot/m-p/865809/highlight/true#M32288

I will probably try his steps tonight when I get home.  I was really hoping it would’ve been able to do the 200 GB overnight and be done this morning when I got up, wouldn’t that be a normal expectation over ethernet?  Especially since my wife’s had done close to that.  Even if it wasn’t done, I figured it would be close, but 23 GB was a shock.  :confounded:  Again, I know it’s going to be stupid slow over wifi until I upgrade my router.  I’m ok with going over ethernet for the times that I’ve added a lot or made a big change.  The videos it’s working on now are .m2ts, if that makes a difference, but from what I’ve read, it’s usually faster with fewer big files, than a lot of little files.  

Here’s a portion of the log, if it helps:

7/20/15 10:17:54.720 PM    com.apple.backupd[576]    Not using file event preflight for Jackie’s Passport

7/20/15 10:17:58.356 PM    com.apple.backupd[576]    Found 65393 files (184.61 GB) needing backup

7/20/15 10:17:58.468 PM    com.apple.backupd[576]    207.33 GB required (including padding), 2.84 TB available

7/20/15 10:41:15.798 PM    com.apple.backupd[576]    Bulk setting Spotlight attributes failed.

7/20/15 11:16:02.869 PM    com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/20/15 11:16:56.877 PM    com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 415.9 MB of 184.61 GB, 1940 of 65393 items

7/21/15 12:16:09.853 AM    com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 12:17:39.052 AM    com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 597.6 MB of 184.61 GB, 5205 of 65393 items

7/21/15 1:16:12.262 AM      com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 1:17:43.223 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 839.9 MB of 184.61 GB, 7283 of 65393 items

7/21/15 2:16:12.257 AM      com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 2:19:21.686 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 938.3 MB of 184.61 GB, 8664 of 65393 items

7/21/15 3:16:14.499 AM      com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 3:19:23.848 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 1.89 GB of 184.61 GB, 72837 of 72837 items

7/21/15 3:25:18.459 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 65732 items (1.9 GB) from volume OS X. Linked 7249.

7/21/15 4:16:14.504 AM      com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 4:19:24.698 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 5.19 GB of 184.61 GB, 73270 of 73270 items

7/21/15 5:16:14.507 AM      com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 5:25:11.696 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 9.65 GB of 184.61 GB, 73278 of 73278 items

7/21/15 6:16:14.511 AM      com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 6:25:32.013 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 14.96 GB of 184.61 GB, 73299 of 73299 items

7/21/15 7:16:14.513 AM      com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 7:30:56.721 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 19.55 GB of 184.61 GB, 73315 of 73315 items

7/21/15 8:16:14.518 AM      com.apple.backupd-helper[663]    Not starting scheduled Time Machine backup: Backup already running

7/21/15 8:30:57.350 AM      com.apple.backupd[576]    Copied 23.22 GB of 184.61 GB, 73332 of 73332 items

It finally started hitting around 4-5 GB an hour.  Is that normal over ethernet?

Again, sorry for the rehash of the subject, and the long post.

Thanks to everyone in advance, the community seems very helpful!

2

Hello and welcome to the WD Community

See if the following link helps.

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/extremely-slow-failed-time-machine-backup-and-then-extremely/m-p/656791/highlight/true#M4423

Some users were providing some tips to improve the connectivity on the unit.

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Actually, I have good news!

First, I tried the steps mentioned in my first post.  The speeds were the same overnight, except deleting the .plist made it think it needed to backup the entire 500+ GB, losing the 325GB that it took me a week to copy.  :cry:  Out of curiousity, while still having the drive directly connected via ethernet to my laptop, I tried copying the same 500GB Videos folder to the share created for my user name, directly in the finder.  It was flying, copying a couple of GB’s in a minute or two, so it had to be Time Machine related somehow.  I found a post by related to the WD My Live here:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23685401#23685401

I basically did the same thing.  I should’ve tried these one at a time to see what actually worked, but I was all in at this point.

Stopped Time Machine backup and turned off Time Machine

System Restore (Not touching any data on the drive) to the drive

Recreated my user after the drive rebooted

Went to the ‘Users’ tab and this time set a password

Under ‘Share Access’ for the user, I granted Full Access to my User, the SmartWare, and TimeMachineBackup shares

On the ‘Shares’ tab I turned off ‘Media Serving’ and ‘Public Access’ for each one (Public share won’t let you disable Public Access) and made sure my user had ‘Full Access’ at the bottom

On the ‘Cloud Access’ tab, it’s disabled for my user

On the ‘Settings’ tab:

On the ‘General’ tab to the left, I turned off ‘Cloud Access’ and ‘Drive Sleep’

On the ‘Media’ tab, I turned off ‘Media Streaming’ and ‘Itunes Server’

Rebooted Drive

Went back to Time Machine, selected the drive again, this time signing in with my My Cloud User name and password, rather than ‘Guest’

It took off!  I was pretty much getting the 1GB a minute speeds I’d seen others mentioning.  At about 3 hours in, I’d copied what it took a week to get to previously!  I finished the full folder in about 6-ish hours.  This is more than acceptable for me.  I’m fine with having to hook it up directly anytime I make big changes, until I can upgrade my router.

Again, it’s tough to say which thing made the most difference, or if it was a combination, but I’m betting it’s probably more the properties of the TImeMachineBackup share, and using a password for it instead of it being Public and using Guest.

I hope this helps someone else!