I have a WD My Book that I just bought. I set it up to be the Time Machine backup drive for my iMac. To do that, I partitioned it as one partition, MacOS Extended Journaled, with a GUID partition table. I then formatted it. Did this all with the macOS Sierra Disk Utility. The initial backup worked fine. The next morning, I get an error that the Time Machine backup could not be completed. I try to read the disk and it won’t work. I have to power it down and back up. It will not read its backup now and makes me start it from scratch. So I reformatted and tried again… it worked. But then next morning, the same error. I sent the drive back and WD sent me a new one. The new one worked fine… until I went to bed, then the next morning it’s back to the same error. What can I do?
Hello,
Try this:
1- Go to the Time Machine menu or system preferences and stop the current backup
2- Open the Time Machine disk, go to the “Backups.backupdb” folder, and remove the file that ends with “.inProgress” as its suffix
3- Eject the Time Machine drive and detach it from the system
4- After a few moments, re-attach the drive
5- Manually initiate a backup from the Time Machine menu, if one does not begin automatically
If you search here you will find a number of similar reports with Sierra, TM and WD My Book. I went through 3 drives, troubleshooting, searching and generally getting frustrated before returning and giving up, got a refund and purchased an alternative brand. Not a single problem since.
In my experience only, if you allow your Mac to sleep you will get this fault on wakeup and the only solution is to disconnect and power down the drive. If you don’t use the sleep function the drive will work faultlessly with TM. WD so far don’t seem to acknowledge an issue. I might add, my experience was on a brand new late 2015 iMac and I would have preferred using a WD drive as older ones had been great and still work faultlessly (both USB 2 and 3).
That works once or twice then it fails again. WD: any other solutions?
