Recently (last weekend) I purchased a My Passport 4 TB USB drive to plug into the back of my MyCloud EX2 Ultra. Reason: After I had a drive fail in my previous EX2 Ultra unit, rather than sending me just a replacement drive as they originally promised, WD sent me an entire new unit, which actually ended up making my life way more time-consuming and complicated just to fix the problem I had at the time. Figuring I’m not sure I trust their drives beyond 2 years now, and since I changed my RAID configuration to turn my 2 x 4 TB unit into effectively a 1 x 8 TB unit, I set the space on my device allocated for Time Machine backups to be 4 TB, leaving me 4 TB to store all of my other personal data that I wanted to manually manage and backup (primarily all of my photography and videos).
Time Machine now, for some reason, decides it can violate the 4 TB limit I configured for it – this started happening after I purchased and installed the new USB My Passport but prior to the new problematic firmware update (5.27.157). My TM backups are taking up almost 6 TB when they’re supposed to stay within 4 TB; as a result, my free space for my other files is greatly reduced.
Troubleshooting done to date:
Called WD - they told me to call Apple to verify I’m doing incremental backups (of course I am).
Called Apple - took a look at my drive setup but couldn’t really offer any assistance; no answer as to why Time Machine was going above what I set it for.
yeap, sorry this is a well documented problem of timemachine. It doesn’t like space quotas for network drives, not sure why. I don’t think there is a solution for this, but if you find one please share it.
It was working perfectly fine and honoring the backup limit prior to the recent firmware upgrade, so I don’t know what’s going on.
I’ve since reduced my backup space from 4.0 TB to 3.8 TB just to see if it’ll recognize that it’s exceeded the limit, and try to remove old backups. Recent tests within the past 24 hours seem to confirm that it’s totally disregarding the new limit.
check the link below, they may give you a hint of what you want to try to see if something makes a difference.
Generally, I found the hard way that Timemachine is a great backup solution if you’re using attached drives as a destination, but for network drives, it’s pretty unreliable.
I can feel your pain. With each FW upgrade WD breaks something. Time Machine stopped working some time ago, recently broke my LMS server and now my homebridge setup. Interesting to see what they break next.
WD if you read could you at least upgrade your kernel to a more recent distribution? For how long you’ll rely on a 2018 kernel distro?
my solution unfortunately does not work anymore.