I can’t find any recent or conclusive threads/solutions about this problem, so I’m wondering if anyone can help me…
I have a single-bay 4Tb My Cloud NAS drive and decided it was time to back it up. I bought a dedicated 5Tb Seagate USB hard drive to connect directly to the My Cloud, then accessed the dashboard via web browser to set up a Safepoint.
The first time, the safepoint got to about 400Gb. The 2nd time to about 350Gb, but it goes no further. Sometimes when I return to check progress, the USB drive is not recognised and I have to reconnect it. Sometimes it is still connected. But either way, the safepoint update is stalled and has stopped copying files. I click ‘update’ but still progress doesn’t continue. The only thing I can do is to re-format the USB drive and start again.
The USB drive is formatted to NTFS. What can I do?
First step is to check the external USB hard drive for errors in a Windows PC (if you have one available).
When performing a SafePoint, the first time creating that SafePoint will typically take a very long time depending on how much data is on the My Cloud hard drive. One may have to leave the My Cloud alone for up to 24 hours or longer while the SafePoint runs.
Couple of things to try as a troubleshooting step.
Disable the My Cloud Sleep option (if available) in the My Cloud Settings.
Some external USB hard drives may have their own sleep settings that can be configured by the drive manufacturers software. One may need to adjust those sleep settings using the manufacturer software.
The external hard drive may be overheating and slowing or stopping data transfer. Check the drive to see if its very hot.
Restart the My Cloud and try the SafePoint backup again.
SafePoint might have issues with file names containing special characters.
If possible, check the My Cloud logs via the Dashboard > Help section to see if those logs indicate why the SafePoint is stalling or not completing.
Or don’t use SafePoint (see past discussions in this subforum on issues with SafePoint) and use SSH to setup a script to trigger an Rsync backup of the My Cloud data to the external USB hard drive. See the following discussion for using Rsync instead of SafePoint.
USB drive doesn’t have a sleep setting as far as I can tell.
Restarting multuple times.
Checking for special characters at the stall directory (none there).
Can’t find where to access logs in Dashboard > Help. It gives me the option to create a logs file but doesn’t say where it is, or confirm that it’s been created.
It is very hot, so I will check for overheating. But the only other thing for me to try is the alternative to Safepoint (which is a little daunting to me as a non-programmer guy).
I have the same device as you, 1st generation, and it is connected to my router and used on my home network. I have never tried connecting anything to the usb connection.
Safepoint stalling, from what I remember when I used it, was a common issue. Another suggestion, if it is possible. Its been a few years since I used Safepoint. Create a Safepoint and if possible select a single Share on the My Cloud to backup. If the Safepoint backup completes backing up a single Share, then proceed to add another Share and perform another Safepoint backup. Continue until you find the Share where the backup stalls. You can then choose to either manually copy that specific Share to the USB drive or edit Safepoint and skip that specific Share and proceed to the next one until all the Shares that don’t stall on backup are selected and being backed up by Safepoint.
If it always hangs at roughly the same point, I’d stop treating it as a USB or overheating problem and start treating it as a data-specific issue. On these older My Cloud units, Safepoint can silently choke on a single problematic file, folder, or metadata entry without throwing a useful error. Instead of just adding shares one by one, narrow it down further by splitting the failing share into smaller folders and backing those up separately until you isolate the exact directory. Once you find it, look for unusually large files, deeply nested folders, or files that may have been partially written or corrupted. If everything else backs up reliably except that one folder, the NAS hardware is probably fine and you’ve identified a Safepoint limitation rather than a failing drive.
I just wanted to come here to say that 'Win11DataSavior’s’ suggestion seems to have solved the problem for me. The safepoint data transfer kept stalling whilst backing up my Mailbird email folder archives. I removed these from the backup (because I don’t really need to back them up anyway) and now the backup has been running continuously for about 40 hours with no problems, and has gone further than ever.
Seemingly, the Mailbird email folders contained either files containing problematic characters, or filenames that were way too long.
I hope this helps someone else having a similar problem. Check the filenames of the files you’re trying to backup!
