Hi,
Since it doesn’t seem that partial backups will be coming to the MyCloud device anytime soon, I went ahead and bought a 3TB WD Essential USB3 drive to back up the MyCloud device; at least that was the plan. I formatted the external drive as HFS+J on the Mac and plugged it into the back of the MyCloud server. I then created a safepoint and set it to update automatically once a week Sundays at midnight. I opted to started the copying process right away and saw the progress indicator appear.
I then navigated away from the MyCloud web interface and came back a few minutes later to check the status; I wanted to get an idea about the copying speed. The safepoint tab was no longer showing the progress bar, but rather the spinning wheel trying to locate existing safepoints; it never stopped spinning, though. At this point, the attached USB drive was no longer visible under attached devices either and I couldn’t access any of the MyCloud shares on my computer.
Trying to reboot the server from the web interface did not work either. After force rebooting the server and starting another safepoint backup, I attempted to access a share from the desktop, and yet again wasn’t able to connect to the server while the backup was in progress. I logged into the web interface and once again couldn’t see the attached USB drive anymore. Sure enough, the safepoint tab was as described above, no indication of an ongoing backup.
To me, it appears that any interaction with the server while the backup process is underway crashes the server. I would love to hear from people who were able to successfully use the safepoint feature under the current firmware (2/23/2015). It’s a realy danger not being able to backup the content of the drive at least locally, let alone to a cloud / off-site location; I hope this will be added in the near future.
Thanks,
Carsten
