I’ve been trying to setup what, I think, the My Cloud EX2 calls NAS to USB backup. When USB devices are attached it seems like the EX2 automatically creates a share using a rather obscure name. However, it also looks like the button that would be used for removing such a share is always inactive (i.e., cannot be selected).
On my first attempt at setting up this kind of backup I formatted the USB drive for use of NTFS. It seems that this has the affect of allowing a backup job to run successfully only one time. Attempting to rerun that job fails with an error indicating that the device is in READ-ONLY mode. Therefore, I finally got around to trying a device formatted as EXT for these backups. A limited amount of experimentation indicates that this setup is at least able to rerun the backup job.
Therefore, it looks like I need to reformat the device I purchased with enough capacity for backup purposes to EXT which means that the NTFS share will never be able to be used again and there is no need for the share to be defined. While I suppose that this should not affect the functioning of new shares the idea of showing a bunch of unusable shares is pretty ugly and keeping track of them creates unwanted confusion.
It is starting to look like there was NO provision made for removing a USB share when this thing was designed. Seems like that is a pretty significant omission.
It also seems like the answer might be what is called a System-Only Restore-To-Default? The documentation indicates that this operation is non-destructive (i.e., user data is not lost). If so this should suit my needs at present. However I must admit that my confidence in this device is quite limited. Unfortunately I do have a lot of data stored on it that I don’t want to loose (i.e., why it is important for backup to work properly in the first place).
If anyone with experience using System-Only Restore-To-Default could offer some opinion about how well it works, I’d be most grateful.
A little more dart throwing now suggests that part of the answer is that USB shares disappear when the USB device is removed (i.e., detached or possibly just turned off). The word disappear is used because it cannot be found anywhere in the MyCloud UI. However, in order to reappear when subsequently restarted there must be some persistent record of the share. The mystery that remains is how such persistence is maintained. It appears as though this is where the strange system generated names come into play. In one context these names are referred to as volumes and speculation would be that the MyCloud design intends that such names can be uniquely created based on some information obtained from the particular USB device.
While this finding creates more questions than it answers it does suggest that my original concern is NOT the kind of problem I was imagining.
