No Backup after OS5 5.19.117

Regarding Mobile access, that’s a valid point. I turned it off.

I’ve got SBM2, SMB3 enabled.

I just finished the first backup on the iMac since Jan 10 to the MyCloud. Ran to completion without an issue. I’m still scratching my head. One thing for sure, I know a lot more about the OS5 interface than I did a week ago! Now I’ll go give the Mac Air a try…

Turning off web access will prevent indexing this share.

I appreciate the advice

Right now – fingers crossed – everything is back up and working. Why? Don’t know, which is something I don’t like since misbehaving bits and bytes ALWAYS have an explanation; they don’t stop working because they’re in a snit.

Thanks to everyone who threw advice my way. I was on the verge of saying the hell with it and switching to Synology but looking at some of their user groups it would appear that I might be going from the frying pan to the fire.

After thinking about the various steps that I took to get my My Cloud back on line, I’m leaning toward one possibility. During the update the status of the TimeMachine share may have been changed from “public” to “private” in the code but the slider still said “public.” The last time, before I rebooted the My Cloud, I moved the slider from public to private, then back to public.

I’m thinking that anyone who has a similar problem probably ought to do that as well as moving the slider for the TimeMachine setting from on, then off, then back to on – then reboot. Just a thought…

glad you are making progress.

I tested again (note - Using latest Apple OS and the beta )

Admin account on mac mini M1 and admin ( not guest ) on WD ex2ultra

made a alias on mac desktop of the NAS timemachinebackup share.

selected that for use as a new time machine backup disk

Was asked for NAS user and password - used registered user not guest.

started backup – took over one hour saw 95 MB/s on mac and 101 MB rx on EX2

added some new files to mac and did a second inc backup

got that old error and had to do a FIX selection on the alias then second backup worked also a third backup also worked ( error may have been a time out of NAS ) - need to check later

TM and the alias have smb://the nas type_smb_tcp.local/timemachinebackup

TimemachineBackup does show as a TM available disk.

The error I got before I (fix the alias ) may have been the same you posted.
I forgot to take a picture, sorry.

At least from the Apple side backups to NAS is faster that older mac OS builds.

The MAC system disk was 141 GB that was used for this test

Cordorb – At this point, I seem to be “out of the woods.” Backups are alternating correctly between the MyCloud and USB-based external SSD drives without my involvement.

Reading your comments I believe I’m doing two things differently:

  1. I use “guest” as recommended by WD.
  2. I don’t worry about an alias. In fact I don’t mount the server (e.g. the NAS). Time Machine finds it automatically (provided it’s on the same network and in the same workgroup) as an SMB.

I successfully back up multiple MACs into the same guest master directory (e.g. TimeMachineBackup in my case), but each has its own sub-file (e.g. sparse bundle).

I’m having the exact same issue : my MacBook Pro M1 with MacOS Monterey 12.1 had been backuping its Time Machine to my NAS WDMyCloud EX4100 until January 10th, 2022. After this date, my NAS WDMyCloud EX4100 has been updated with system 5.19.117 and now Time Machine complains about bad login/ bad password to access the NAS WDMyCloud EX4100.

It complains when I try to connect with the usual login/password I ever used before.
It complains also when I put the Time Machine share (on the NAS) onto “Public” and try to connect Time Machine (the software on my Mac) as “guest” to it.

I read Cmarsha had finally some success activating/deactivating/reactivating Public/Private slider and reboot its NAS.

It has been 20 minutes now I’m doing that. Public. Private. Public. Reboot. Try to connect with my private account. With Guest. Nothing works. Try again. And again. And again…
I’m still having an authenticating issue.

Regarding the OS 5 admin GUI:

In “Users”, I configured one private account to access Time Machine (used it during the las two years with no issue). I fixed a “quotas” of 3 TB. I understand if i use “Guest”, I couldn’t define a quotas for my backups. (I’m not very confortable with Time Machine using all my share space just to store very old datas I don’t want anymore)

In “Shares”, I have “TimeMachine”. the parameters are:

  • Public = On (when it’s “Off”, my configured user has “Read/write” access)
  • Trash = Off
  • Oplocks = On
  • Web Access = Off
  • FTP Access = Off (greyed)
  • NFS Access = Off (greyed)

In “Parameters/General”, I have:
Mac Backup = On

In “Parameters/Network/Windows Services”, I have:
Workgroup: WORKGROUP
Principal local explorer: STOP
SMB: SMN2, SMB3
LAN NT Manager: NTLMv2 Only
Share aggregation: STOP
Active Directory: STOP
LLTD: STOP

Just tried again. I’m still having an authenticating issue.

Quick questions: From Finder are you able to see your MyCloud all your shares? Can you move a file from your mac to any of your other public shares? What I’m driving at here (and this is really basic) is the drive is properly mounted (you can tell from Drive Utility) and that the issue – same as I had – is limited solely to your TimeMachine Share – that you can see from Finder and you can go to Finder > Go > Connect to Server > smb://wdmycloud … or whatever your server name is and see the file names … but you just can’t get TimeMachine to hook up with that share.

If sounds like you are already far enough down the “road of desperation” to have gone to Time Machine Preferences on the Mac and select “Add/Remove Disk” and picked the public share that you created (which will have the same name as your original share), at which point you are getting the message about authentication. Right?

Thank you for your help Cmarsha.
“From Finder are you able to see your MyCloud all your shares?”
→ yes. By default it connects as the registered user I defined. I still can see the shares when I’m connecting as a guest.

“Can you move a file from your mac to any of your other public shares?”
→ That’s interesting. Actually, I can move files to the public share when I’m connected with the registered user. But, that’s new, I can’t do it anymore as a guest! Ok. I double-check the WDMyCloud admin GUI… Ok, the public Share is no more “public”. No idea why. I’m activating the “Public” slider. Ok. Now I can write a file to the Public share as a guest user.

“is the drive is properly mounted (you can tell from Drive Utility) and that the issue”
→ So, the drive seems to be properly mounted as a NAS, not as a local drive. Finder sees it as a Network drive (CMD+I shows “location : network”), but MacOS’ Drive Utiliy doesn’t see it (and I think it’s normal, since MacOS’ Drive Utiliy is supposed to see only directly attached drives, or “Block volumes” if you prefer, not the “File System volumes”).

“go to Finder > Go > Connect to Server > smb://wdmycloud…”
→ after having disconnected from the NAS in Finder (just to be sure), I go to Go > Connect to Server > smb://192.168.1.27/ since that’s the local IP address of my NAS MyCloud. It shows me the shares.
I select “Public” - > works, as in Finder, connected as guest.
I select “TimeMachine” (the name of my Time Machine’s share on the NAS), it fails.
I retry with “Go > Connect to Server > smb://myregistereduser@192.168.1.27/”. It fails.
I retry with “Go > Connect to Server > smb://myregistereduser:mypassword@192.168.1.27/”. It asks for a share. I select the “Public” share. It works. I do it again and now I select “TimeMachine” share. It fails.
I retry with "Go > Connect to Server > smb://myregistereduser:mypassword@WDMyCloudEX4100. It works exactly like it did with the IP address : access to Public share granted, access to TimeMachine share refused.

"If sounds like you are already far enough down the “road of desperation” to have gone to Time Machine Preferences on the Mac and select “Add/Remove Disk”
→ Indeed. I removed the disk. TimeMachine asks me to select a new disk. And it shows the “TimeMachine” share “on WDMyCloudEX4100.local”. I pick it.
I try to connect to it with the registered user, then I get the message about authentication.
I try again to connect but as a guest user, then I get the same message about authentication.

I did all that many, many times. Each time I hope that “something” happens. but, no.

And obviously I tried with the command line:

$ sudo tmutil setdestination -p "smb://myregistereduser@WDMyCloudEX4100/TimeMachine"
Destination password: 
Failed to mount smb://WDMyCloudEX4100/TimeMachine (error 22)
The backup destination could not be set.
$ sudo tmutil setdestination "smb://guest:guest@WDMyCloudEX4100/TimeMachine"
Failed to mount smb://WDMyCloudEX4100/TimeMachine (error 22)
The backup destination could not be set.

Just to check, I also tried in AFP: (deprecated, but you never know)

$ sudo tmutil setdestination -p "afp://myregistereduser@192.168.1.27/TimeMachine"
Destination password:
Failed to open session. (error 5)
The backup destination could not be set.

Oh. And I also tried to change the name of the share. “TimeMachineBackup”. The same results. But I could notice my Time Machine Preference on my Mac see in real time the change of the name… So I guess the NAS does the job correctly to communicate its share on the network and the Mac updates correctly in real time what happens on the network. So the network itself, the SMB announcements seem to work as expected.

It’s like if the MyCloud NAS didn’t register in its parameters the same authentication details I enter in the GUI…

Yes, I’m stil on the “road of desperation”

yserra – You’ve making my head hurt (and making me count my blessings that I found my way out of the NAS/Time Machine briar patch – at least for now).

What I find interesting about your very, very detailed mapping of each step you just took is your comment " I double-check the WDMyCloud admin GUI… Ok, the public Share is no more “public”. No idea why. "

I had the same experience; when I was working back-and-forth trying to untangle my mess, the Time Machine share suddenly was “not public.” (I run mine “public.”) I know I didn’t change it.

On another occasion, suddenly the Time Machine “On/Off” switch (under Network as I recall) was suddenly “off.” I turned it on, went to another part of the GUI and when I came back it was “off” again. I finally got it to set “on” and stay on.

So…in an act of further desperation, throw the TimeMachine switch to off. Log off the GUI. Log on. Turn it back on. Log off. Log on. See if it holds. Then try to authenticate the share from within Time Machine.

I’m out of ideas … but there is clearly something going on here with the new release of OS5 that has at least affected three Mac M1s with Monterey. Two of mine and yours – and they share exactly the same symptoms.

I have the same problem. No more Timemachine backups are made. I cannot delete the Public folder. So I create a new share for the Timemachine backup.
It works oké, but I’m losing a lot of space…

I had to do the same thing. I basically lost my old TimeMachine history (Small price to pay.) I started over.

So you can’t delete the old backup from within TimeMachine on the Mac (using Add/Delete Disk), even though it has the same name. That’s the way I did it. I had two listings under the same name. I deleted the “upper” one – e.g. the old one. This is the easy and approved way of doing it.

If your can’t do this, can you delete it from Finder (I['m assuming you are Mac-based) by drilling down to the spasebundle (Finder > Go > Connect to Disk > insert smb://wdmycloud, then register as guest.)? You should be able drill down to the different backups from Finder and delete the one you want to delete. You should be able to tell the difference from your current backup by the date. If it says “in use” then turn off Auto-Backups in Finder on your Mac and reboot the Mac, and try again.

Here something to ponder:

Background – I had to go help an old friend who has a My Cloud Home unit that stopped backing up on Jan 10. “My Cloud” and “My Cloud Home” are two different products, of course, so I had to stumble around a bit. There is no Dashboard for the Home product and the web or application interface is pretty basic.

But…just like my My Cloud unit that refused to backup with Time Machine, I could use Mac Finder to see his remote drive and its directories. I could go into Time Machine and see prior backups. However, when I attempted to launch a “Backup Now” all it did was “Searching for the Drive” and would fail over. Tried rebooting and doing all the normal stuff when things don’t work.

My Cloud Home has a dedicated support page from WD, and I ran across this:

That links to this:

According to my friend, he had received no email notice that AFP was being “terminated.” So I followed the instructions, based on the expressed written assurance that no Time Machine data would be lost. (We’ll see…)

Follow the standard Time Machine steps to set up a remote disk (as outline in the link noted above), the My Cloud Home was found from Time Machine, I signed on as a Guest and Voila! Backup restarted!

So, could all of these problems that we’ve having be as simple as the My Cloud NAS still trying to do AFP (which I thought Apple had killed) and you have to simple reselect the Time Machine share and let it do its thing in SMB? Were we just “out-thinking” it? As an aside – it did exactly what’s in the web link and I got my backups restarted a few days ago. Of course, with My Cloud you have to make sure that you’re SMB2 and SMB 3, That Time Machine is turned on, etc.

Crazy!

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Well…the good news: My friend’s Mac backed up. The bad news: none of the prior Time Machine backups are visible, regardless of the assurance in the WD documentation. I’m not particularly surprised at this outcome.

Hi Cmarsha,

So, it FINALLY WORKS!!!
I tried to follow what your “friend’” did. I’m sure I followed these exact steps before. As expected, it didn’t work. One more time.

Then, I tried something new : in the My Cloud GUI, I went to General, clicked “Configure” next to the slider TimeMachine. There, I previously set it to use only 28% of the capacity (because I don’t want to have my 17TB NAS filled with old historic backup datas that I don’t care anymore). Just for fun, I push the slider to 100%. Only that.
And guess what?
Suddenly TimeMachine (the tool on the Mac) accepted to connect to my TimeMachine folder on the WD MyCloud!!!
Yes!!
And It does it not only as a guest, but with my registered user also!!
By the way, I would recommend to use a registered user with some quotas. Not a guest user. The registered user with quotas is a way to tell TimeMachine it can’t use any more space on the NAS than the quotas you give to the registered user, so you can limit the size of the backup. My MacBook has a 2TB drive filled at 30%. My registered user has a quotas of 2TB, that is already overkill, I think.

EDIT: It works but, not only that, it took also my previous backup!! (I didn’t delete the file on the MyCloud NAS, this file was still accessible from Finder. It’s just that the TimeMachine tool didn’t connect to the TimeMachine Share).
So, my guess: the update of the latest WD MyCloud OS may have broken its TimeMachine functionality not because of the AFP/SMB thing, but maybe only because of the parameter “use 28% of the size”. We will never be sure.

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That’s good news. I’ve always run my Time Machine share as “public” because that’s what WD recommends. I will look into the user/password option since that would be the better way to keep Time Machine from “eating” all my NAS storage space.

As noted above, I’ve about come to the conclusion – like that line out of Hamlet – that you’ve “got to screw your courage to the sticking point” and just start a new NAS backup under the same name to force everything to the SMB change. This would not be the first time that I discovered that Time Machine just stopped backing up. Why? Don’t know. So you start over. (…and is a reason that I check the status of my backups on a regular basis)

I have the same problem. Hope there comes an update!
The problem occurs when you don’t use the whole disk for timemachine.

I know I’m coming in here late but I have a Mac mini 2020 with the M1 chip. I have 2 “My Passport for Mac” one is 4TB the other 2TB I installed them in late Oct they each have a 1TB partition for Time machine. Somewhere in November the 4TD one quit backing up I didn’t notice it until I start getting the notices

Screen Shot 2022-01-26 at 9.08.01 PM

when I booted up I was thinking the drive failed because I am not is knowledgeable as some of you seem to be. I am going to try some of the suggestions you have made and hope I can get it to start up again.
I have a couple of questions some of you refer to my cloud home is that something that I have and how would I know that I have it? I only use my computer email, for working with my photographs, some Reddit, and some Facebook.
The reason I am setting up this mini is May 2011 21 inch iMac it’s getting a little old. At this point I have not moved my iPhoto’s into the mini I want to have everything working correctly first.

Badbird –

You are backing up to alternating Mac Passport USB-connected drives it sounds like. You do not have a “MyCloud” or “MyCloud Home” so you can disregard all of the discussions specific to these Western Digital Network Accessed Servers.

The screen shot that you attached does not indicate if you failed to get a backup. What it does indicate is that you are disconnecting the Passport without formally “ejecting” it. I see the two drive names that are reporting an improper ejection. This must be the two partitions on the 4T Passport. A Mac Passports is powered from the USB port so this is not a situation where you are hitting an “off” switch. Normally you would get this message if you just jerk the USB-3 cable out of the Mac Mini – something you don’t want to do. It’s also something you would never want to do while a backup is in progress.

Since you have a Mac Mini, so I assume you are not moving it around from place-to-place. If this is the case, why would the 4T Passport need to be disconnected? Tell us a bit more about this.

Under normal operating procedures for a Mac, before you disconnect a USB-based external drive, you should either right click on the icon on your desktop (assuming you have “show external drives” turned on in Finder settings), or go to Finder, and right click on the external USB drive and select “Eject.” Once the drive disappears from Finder you can safely disconnect the USB cable.

Moving on…

Let’s assume that you go to Time Machine at the top of your screen and select “Time Machine Preferences.” Once in there you see that one of the drives is reporting a current backup and the other (the 4T Passport ) has a very stale backup.

It’s been my experience with Time Machine – particularly after a system update – that it suddenly, and for reasons known only to itself, stops backing up. This is one reason that I check it every day or so. This is also why alternating backups is a great idea.

There are a couple of options but this might be the most straight-forward:

Under “Open Time Machine Preferences…” select "Add or Remove Backup Disks. " Select the backup disk (e.g. the one you call “Time Machine”) on the 4T drive. Delete that disk – and only that disk – from within Time Machine. (In other words, don’t mess with your good backup.) Once the deleting completes, then add the same Disk back as a backup and tell Time Machine that you want to backup on both drives. Now go to Time Machine and select “Backup Now” and see what happens. It should start backing up to the “new” backup. If this works and once you have a new backup, then the two drives should go back to alternating.

Hope I haven’t confused you…

Good luck.