Hey guys, just bought my WD My Cloud in 4TB to sit on my network. The main purpose is just to wirelessly back up my computers on our network. Normally, I would just partition a hard drive and set each of my computers to back up into their particular partition, but I can’t seem to figure out how to do that here. Any help, suggestions, thoughts?
You cannot (officially) partition a single bay/single drive My Cloud device’s internal hard drive. It is ALREADY partitioned and formatted. The My Cloud is network attached storage device. You should, if you haven’t done so already, read the My Cloud User Manual (http://support.wdc.com/product.aspx?ID=904) to learn about the device, its features and how to use it.
I’ve read the manual, still don’t understand it all…thought this was going to be simple.
Create a “Share” for each computer. Backing up using a WiFi connection will be very slow compared to being hardwired.
There are specific chapters in the My Cloud User Manual that cover how to create Users, how to create Shares (basically think of them as folders or directories) and how to use Smartware for Windows or Time Machine for Mac to backup computers to the My Cloud. Smartware can be downloaded the the link in my previous post.
As SectorGZ indicated backing up over a WiFi connection will be much slower than backing up over a wired Ethernet Gigabit connection.
Having read up on the “shares” I still have a concern. Specifically, we have 4 MacBooks that will be using this HD, storing their Time Machine backups. However, Time Machine continues to write backups until the storage capacity is full at which time it starts deleting the oldest backups. The reason I want to partition the drive is to limit the size of the backup space. So, if I have a 512GB hard drive and a 550GB partition, for example, I’ll have room for a full back up from Time Machine and a couple of the additional daily backups. However, if I have 4 machines at 512GB each, backing up regularly, my 4TB HD will fill up very quickly. Is there a solution for this that I’m not seeing?
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Use “User Quota” instead of partitions (Already in kernel, but need manually configure from console)
I’m not sure what you mean by already in kernel? Nor do I see how to configure it from a console.
I have been able to create multiple shares for our different MacBooks. When I’m in the “Settings” page and click to configure Time Machine Backups I can then limit the space for that particular share. Everything seems to work and I’ve been successful in mapping my MacBook to backup to the share I created for my MB. However, when I go to another MacBook to configure it, I only see the same share that I created for my other MacBook. It doesn’t seem to allow me to have multiple shares configured for different TimeMachine backups. Is there a work around for this?
Cameron
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For anyone who comes across this older thread about trying (unsuccessfully) to enable multiple shares to each be usable as a Time Machine backup destination (e.g., where each Mac has its own distinct share on the NAS) … you may be interested in this (early 2021) thread: Multiple Time Machine backups not working … It concerns a different specific NAS model, but seems to be the same issue.
