Having lived with the MyBook Live 2TB for a few weeks now I do wonder if this product is aimed at mainly Windows users with Macs something of an afterthought?
I just don’t think there has been enough product develpoment for the Mac or perhaps I should say in my case the iMac. What do others think?
I have found TM backups to be problematic to say the least. Some backups race through with no problems whatsoever – this is good. However, others seem to hang then simply crawl for no apparent reason. My machine did one last night, 185mb – took almost an hour. After 50 minutes it stated 185mb of 185mb completed – 1hr 10mins in and it still said the same. In the end I shut the Mac down and rebooted. My previous USB HD did hundreds of TM backups without one single issue – ever.
Then of course there is “sleep” or should I say “no sleep”. Most computers these days use sleep (including Windows). My iMac never used to get shut down fully unless there was an update. Now the only real way to guarantee the MBL will enter sleep mode is to shut down the iMac completeley? If I just put the iMac to sleep then the MBL will go to sleep for perhaps the first couple of times I use iMac sleep then that is it. After the first couple of times putting the iMac into sleep mode the MBL no longer sleeps – instead it just usually displays continous green light.
Even when the MBL does sleep it’s never for too long due to TM. As most Mac owners will know TM backs up every hour. My MBL does not enter sleep (when it sleeps that is) until around the 20 minute mark. TM wakes up MBL a few minutes before backups are due, around 10 minutes for a normal backup, twenty minutes for MBL to sleep again so that’s 30 minutes gone. As you can see, with this scenario even if sleep works the MBL isn’t getting much of it.
To sum up then – a product that needs more development for Mac and possibly not a product for Mac users?
There is the other question of course i.e. should you be using your NAS for backups as well as data storage?
