See my previous posts in this thread for more details. With the My Book Plugged into the My Cloud everything is normal until I start a backup and then I loose all contact with the My Cloud.
Have you tried performing a 40 second reset? Sometimes a reset can fix the odd ball error with the My Cloud. Also if possible try another USB device and see if the backup completes. Could be a problem with that one particular My Book device.
Bob,
We are all users just like you , there is no WD Support on this forum. Since you have been trying to get help and not getting a solution I suggest contacting WD Support directly. Both, your MyCloud and My Book, are WD devices they SHOULD be able to solve your problem.
The users here are helping each other because that is about the only place we can get help. WD support is somewhat lacking unless you can get to a level 2 or 3 within their organization, but it is worth a try.
SectorGZ: I understand that the people here are not WD techs but just users (hopefully some of whom have more experience than me; that wouldn’t be hard 
). I spend a lot of time on bike forums, both giving & getting advice so I know how that works.
Jamalaya: I’m sorry if my last reply to you seemed curt. I was in a bit of a rush but i did want to acknowledge you.
Bennor: I haven’t done the 40 second reset. Yet. I am reserving that for a last resort. I have transferred the backups from the My Book to the other USB drive I have borrowed and re-formatted the My Book so that I can use it as an ordinary USB drive for this.
All: I tried my idea about doing an internal backup to the My Book Share and the My Cloud software doesn’t allow it. When you try to set up an Internal Backup Job the USB drive just doesn’t appear in the list of destinations. Its not just the My Book; I tried plugging a different USB drive into the My Cloud too.
I have done a bunch more reading, both on this forum and from other sources including WD Support. It seems that the My Cloud’s transfer rate for backups is about 10 Mb/sec which means that backing up my data would take about 17 hours, which could explain why the My Cloud was too busy to allow me to access it for such long times.
USB Backup as permitted by the existing software is unacceptable. I know myself well enough to understand that I am lazy & forgetful enough that I need the backups to happen automatically or they will never happen.
I have been looking for a free 3rd party application that will do what I need. This page looks like a good resource for that
After reading the descriptions (my eyes started to glaze over about half way through and I had to give my head a really good shake to wake me up 
) I think one of these might work. What do you folks think?
I tried Everyday Auto Backup first. It was supposed to be able to backup to & from the network but the only device it could find on the network was the computer it was running on. Not much use for what I need…
After that I installed Karen’s Replicator. For those who don’t know, this was written by the late Karen Kenworthy and is part of a legacy of freeware programs she left us called Karen’s Power Tools. It is exactly what I needed. Not only does it perform full file for file backups but it gives you a visual display of what it is doing. AND it allows you to access the My Cloud (both data and dashboard) while it is being backed up.
Here’s how to backup a My Cloud (network drive) to a My Book (backup drive) automatically:
- Download & install Karen’s Replicator (available from Major Geeks, Softpedia and other similar sites).
- You can minimize Replicator and leave it running all the time but I prefer to use Windows Task Scheduler to launch programs like this a little before they are scheduled to run. In my case Scheduler opens Replicator at 12:45 AM every day.
- (optional) Empty & format the My Book.
- Connect the My Book to the My Cloud, then access the My Book via Windows Explorer and create a folder on the My Book for each Share on the My Cloud.
- Open Replicator and create a Job for each My Cloud Share to back it up to the corresponding Folder. I set mine up to run every night at 1 hour intervals starting at 1:00 AM. If you have a lot of data you could use longer intervals or backup each share on a separate night but unless it is still running when you come back in the morning it probably doesn’t matter since Replicator will just start the next job when the one already running finishes.
Since I want the backup to be exactly the same as my network drive I left Copy Files Only if Changed or Added and all of the related settings checked plus I checked Replicate Folder and File Deletions. - Run each job manually. If there is a lot of data this will take a long time the first time you do it (Duh!). The next time it will run much faster (e.g. a 173 GB share took a bit over half an hour on my computer).
- When I get up in the morning Replicator is open with reports of what it did if I choose to read them. I can then close it and it will automatically start and run the next night.
Now that that is set up and working I need to create another Folder on the My Book for backups of the individual computers (there are currently 2 desktops, 3 laptops and a tablet) and set them up to auto backup to it but that is pretty easy with Windows 10.
