Restoring from time machine backup on wd-my-cloud

Here is the situation:

I have a 3TB wd-my-cloud device. The imac I have has a 1TB drive and about 800GB of data. I completed a time mahine backup about a month ago on my wd cloud. I had to reinstall my OS on my imac as I was having problems with the HDD so I’m trying to use the migration assistant to import the data from the backup. The imac sees the WD device and I get to the ‘loading backup’. It sat like this for over 15 hours and I’ve gotten no further.

couple of questions

using the USB port on the wd-my-cloud can I hook up another external HDD and copy the timemachine data directly via usb 3.0 so I can load the time machine via usb instead of the network?

I’ve verified between the WD-MY-CLOUD and switch it’s all 1GB so I’m not sure why it seems to be hanging like this. Has anyone else had this experience? I also made sure yosemite was 100% updated to latest versions and the wd-my-cloud has the latest version as well. Any help would be appreciated!

Seems some have trouble trying to get Apple’s Time Machine to properly restore from a Time Machine backed up to the My Cloud. Here is one recent thread:

https://community.wd.com/t/cant-connect-wd-mycloud-to-time-machine/163150

Can you copy the Time Machine Share/Folder from the My Cloud to a portable/external USB hard drive? Yes.

See the following Apple documents for more information on using Migration Assistant or Time Machine.

Move your content to a new Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204350
Use Time Machine to back up or restore your Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250

I appreciate your time replying, here is how I retrieved my data.

Per your post, I first formatted 2 different external usb 3.0 harddrives with various filesystems NTFS (supposedly supported read/write according to user guide)/HFS+/exfat/FAT32 none were recognized by this device. No matter what I plugged in it didn’t show up as an external drive . Just kept getting “nothing plugged in” when i moused over the usb button. Frankly, I’m very disappointed in this device any time I plugged in any drive the wdmycloud completely locked up causing or straight up stopped responding for 20-30minutes at a time requiring a hard reboot most times. The only time it recognized an external device was when it said exfat was ‘not supported’ everything failed to be detected.

I know this device runs linux but it’s not difficult for a device to mount an external USB drive when plugged in. I’d consider myself a senior IT tech (been in IT 20+years). Never had I had a device that gave me so much trouble to retrieve data. Dragging and dropping 800GB of data via the app interface causes an instant lock up and inability to use the device or my mac. I’m doing this work for a customer, I’d never recommend this product again to someone to use as it’s very limited on it’s abilities and what it does do it’s horrible at it.

We ended up taking this device apart, there is a video how to do it on youtube and plugged it into a linux box. The file system is ext4 so it requires a linux box to mount (which is what we use for our storage array). Just leaving this info in case someone falls into this disaster 3 to 5 day project this simple situation that required insane amounts of time and effort to retrieve data that should have been simple. Sorry I’m ranting just very disappointed!

For some reason the My Cloud OS has trouble with the way certain USB hard drives are partitioned. While you may have reformatted (or formatted) the USB drive, did you try deleting the partitions and repartioning the entire USB drive?

In my case with a Toshiba USB hard drive the My Cloud OS3 firmware refused to properly mount the drive and it would show 0K. There are several other threads that go into this particular My Cloud USB hard drive 0K issue. In my case repartitioning then reformatting solved the problem and the drive is now recognized by the My Cloud. I detail my experiences and eventual solution in the following thread:

https://community.wd.com/t/this-is-absolutely-unacceptable/149432/8

yes, i used disk utility on a mac and disk management on a pc to try various file formats and none seemed to be accepted. i completely wiped disk of all partitions not just reformatting the same partition.