myCloud, Mavericks

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
21

you have to unplug the My Cloud then plug it back in after 30 seconds

22

this is what works for me, but there has to be a better solution.

23

Same issue with me, just happened again this morning.  Usually if you goto the MyCloud Dashboard in safari and do a reboot of the device, you don’t get a corrupted backup and have to start all over again with a 12 hour backup.

I did read somewhere that the MyCloud had trouble with certain characters when identifying a disk to back up.  For instance, if you point the NAS to “Toms Mac” instead of “Tom’s Mac” that somehow helps.  

24

I think I experienced this issue several months ago. What I determined, if I’m remembering this right, was that Time Machine has trouble if you’ve already (i.e., manually) mounted the Time Machine share on your Desktop.

When Time Machine does a backup, it likes to mount the your backup share on the My Cloud all by itself, then make it’s updates/backups, then dismount the volume/share, again all by itself. (Edit: In fact, when Time Machine’s actually doing a backup, you don’t even see the icon for the My Cloud’s Time Machine share on the desktop!)

I remembering noticing that if a Time Machine share is called “TimeMachineBackups” and you’ve mounted it manually, then when Time Machine kicks in another volume shows up in the /Volumes directory on my Mac, something like “TimeMachineBackups1”. Don’t know if this helps anyone, but once I just let Time Machine do all the mounting (or mapping, if you will) and unmounting by itself, things seem to work very well, on autopilot just like Time Machine’s supposed to work.

Hope this helps.

25

WD is telling me to try making the IP static on the device.  

26

I found it easier to set up a DHCP reservation on my router for the My Cloud, and leave the setting in the My Cloud dashboard to DHCP rather than static. I think it accomplishes the same thing–it keeps the device locked into the same internal IP address–and if you ever have to do a “System Only” factory restore, then you don’t have to go through all the hassle of tweaking the static IP settings all over again (because all settings get reset to the defaults when you do that).

I’m not sure why there’s been this amount of discussion about “mapping” the Time Macine volume or the name of the volume. Here’s why I’m scratching my head about this:

  • Re. your question about names: That’s shouldn’t be a problem at all. You don’t “point” the NAS at anything: you use the Time Machine preference pane to select a backup drive (your My Cloud), and maybe set some folder exclusions if you want, and that’s it. I think the naming thing you’re remembering is that you can’t name the TimeMachine volume on the My Cloud using spaces and apostrophes. But that would never be a problem anyways, because the dashboard won’t let you save names that include forbidden characters.
  • No one should have to “map” the My Cloud’s TimeMachine volume. Ever. For one, Time Machine *requires* that the backup volume be mounted using AFP–it just won’t work with anything else.
  • But more than that, Time Machine takes care of all the mounting and unmounting of it backup volume, invisibly and in the background. When it starts the backup, it first finds and mounts the backup volume. But you won’t see an icon for it or anything on the desktop (it’s a feature, not a bug). It then mounts the disk image located on that volume, because that disk image is where the Time Machine backup data gets written. you won’t see an icon for this on the desktop or Finder sidebar either. When the backup’s finished, Time Machine unmounts the disk image, then unmounts the backup volume. You won’t see any of this–it’s all supposed just happen and work in the background without you having to ever think about it.
  • The way I know this is actually happening is because during a backup, you can select “Go to Folder
” from the Finder’s “Go” menu (⇧⌘G) and in the box enter “/Volumes” (no quotes). Then you can watch the volumes appear and disappear as I’ve described.
  • So basically, all you need to do to get Time Machine working on the My Cloud is:
  1. Activate it in the My Cloud’s web dashboard (it’s recommended that you keep the default name of the backup volume (which is something like “TimeMachine” or “TimeMachineBackup(s)”–whatever it is).
  2. Open the Time Machine preference pane and select the backup disk. Note that what you select is as disk that carries your My Cloud’s name, not the actual “TimeMachineBackups” volume.
  3. That’s it. If Time Machine doesn’t switch on automatically, then flip the slider to on.

From that point on there’s nothing else to be done. If you’ve got a backup already, it’ll just kick in and update it eventually. If it’s the first backup, I think you get a dialog announcing that or something. But don’t bother “mapping” volumes. I’m pretty sure what previous posters were doing is manually mounting the backup volume, and when Time Machine kicked in and went to look for it’s volume, it saw that it was already mounted and “in use”–hence all the “already in use” warnings/errors!

Once you’ve got things configured, just let it do it’s thing.

1 Like
27

Pinax is 100% correct. I just add that you can rename the default share TimeMachineBackup to another name using the admin UI without jeopardizing your ability to choose it for Time Machine. From my experience, what doesn’t work well is to create another share with the admin UI and then try to use this custom share as a Time Machine destination. I cannot explain why this fails. One obvious problem is that you cannot control the quota on custom shares.

28

Etupes wrote:> From my experience, what doesn’t work well is to create another share with the admin UI and then try to use this custom share as a Time Machine destination. I cannot explain why this fails. One obvious problem is that you cannot control the quota on custom shares.

Etupes–

I haven’t tried creating a new share and using it as a Time Machine destination, and I don’t know nearly enough to understand how all this works. I think though that it must be related to one or two configuration files that the netatalk package relies on. One is:

/etc/nas/afp_share.conf

If you view it you’ll notice all the shares listed, with the Time Machine one containing an extra line that the rest don’t have: “time machine = yes”. There’s also:

/var/netatalk/afp_voluuid.conf

which, as the commented-out lines in that file indicate, is “auto-generated by afpd and stores UUIDs for Time Machine volumes”. Again, I really don’t know how all this works, but I would think someone with a better understanding of Linux could probably stop netatalk and the various daemons it gets going, then perhaps edit that first afp_share.conf file to permit other volumes to be available as Time Machine destinations, and finally restart netatalk. I’m not quite brave enough to try that, and I certainly won’t be making any changes to the afp_voluuid.conf file since it says that it’s “auto-generated.” But I have a feeling that /etc/nas/afp_share.conf is what’s regulating all this.

Finally, this is a bit off-topic, but I added post to the “New Ideas” board encouraging WD to update netatalk from the currently installed version (3.0) to the more recent v3.1, which adds support for Spotlight indexing of My Cloud volumes. That package is quite actively maintained, and Spotlight indexing would have lots of benefits (Mac users who get annoyed by Spotlight can presumably just exclude NAS volumes just like any other volume/folder). Take a look and if you like the idea maybe kudo and/or comment on the post to hopefully attract attention from the software developers at WD. The current version in the My Cloud firmware (3.0.3) dates back to March, 2013; an update is not an unreasonable request:

http://community.wd.com/t5/Personal-Cloud-Ideas/Please-include-the-current-release-of-Netatalk-3-1-x-in-future/idi-p/804071