My Cloud running out of space

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

I use my My Cloud primarily for backup of an iMac desktop using Time Machine and also for local backup of several IOS devices.

The Time Machine backup gives me 1 or 2 email warnings a day that I’m running out of space.

How can I stop these nuisance warnings? Or better yet, is there a way to partition the disk for say - 80% for use by Time Machine and the remainder for other chores?

2

Hey @DennisFlorida,

As you already know since Time Machine Software detected low space in the destination volume on My Cloud Device, you need to check the device for same.

  • Access the dashboard (instructions to access the dashboard)
  • On the Home Page, check the Capacity. If the drive shows 90% above, then its time to upgrade to a higher capacity My Cloud. But if not follow the steps below.
  • Go to “Shares” Tab and select the “Time Machine Share” on the left side.
  • Check the “Usage” on the Right side, increase the size to Maximum Space.
  • Now start the Time Machine backup.

Let me know if the issue persists.

3

Time Machine will always fill up the disk and soak up available memory. If there isn’t enough available, it deletes the oldest backup. So the disk will always be full and that’s why the warnings are a nuisance and meaningless.

4

But it should be a feature to reserve a portion of the disk for non-TM backup material

5

In Terminal on your Mac, SSH into your My Cloud NAS:
ssh root@MyCloud_IP (provide your user password at the prompt)
Change to the /etc directory:
cd /etc
Backup your existing smb-global.conf:
cp smb-global.conf smb-global.bak
Edit your smb-global.conf
nano smb-global.conf
Add the following line under [TimeMachineBackup]
fruit:time machine max size = SIZE (put the max size here)
Save & exit nano
Ctrl+o Ctrl+x
Restart samba:
/etc/init.d/samba restart
Exit your SSH session
exit

6

So this changes the max size on the Mac side? correct? I have three Time Machine drives. One is an external 5TB drive, one is the 6TB MyCloud and one is a 2TB Apple Time Capsule (used only for lap tops). I suppose I could set the max to 5TB (BTW - what is the format for the SIZE input in your Terminal command above?) and be safe with both but preclude a future 8TB say?

7

The above hackery would only really “stick” on a gen1 mycloud anyway. Gen2 units have volatile root volumes that live on the initrd. (So you would need to use an application hijack, like wdcrack, or some other means of executing a user script at boot time to make the changes and restart smbd.)

8

The gen2 device saves a copy of the user portion of the smb config file. NOt sure if you could put the fruit:time machine max size = SIZE line in it. the file is located at /mnt/HD_a4/.systemfile/.smbm.xml

9

As it says from the vfs_fruit man page below, it limits the reported disksize, so if you create a 5TB share from the menu, you could limit what Time Machine would use by

fruit:time machine max size = 4500G

which should reserve 500GB of your TM share. Format for the size is a single character unit.

fruit:time machine max size = SIZE [K|M|G|T|P]
Useful for Time Machine: limits the reported disksize, thus
preventing Time Machine from using the whole real disk space for
backup. The option takes a number plus an optional unit.

10

After checking MyCloud, I guess it is from TM that you limit the size of the share/disk to use for storage; the fruit:time machine max size would limit what is reported to TM as the share/disk size.