I have had a MBLD 6TB NAS, configured for RAID 1, for just 5 days and I am having a little trouble making my first Time Machine ™ backup which is approximately 420GB.
I have created a number of Network Shares and copied data to them without problem and relatively quickly too: 350MB in about 5 minutes.
But TM backups are causing me some concern.
Firstly, where are the backups being stored? Apparently not in any of my 'Shares. I can ‘see’ the backup in the WD User Interface (UI) and within TM but where is my TM backup stored on my NAS? Is it in a specially created 'Share of its own? Also, I have a second MacBook Pro I would like to backup. Can the NAS store more than one TM backup?
Secondly, it has taken almost 5 days to backup the 420GB, using a wireless link, but to my surprise the backup continued to 485GB before my MBLD sent me an alert saying it had shutdown. I need to look into what this alert actually means.
I imagine a wired link to my Billion Bipac 7800N Router would produce faster backups but the 1 - 4 MBps typical backup speed is rather disappointing considering Iown an N-type wireless router with gigabit ports. However, after reading numerous threads in this Community and elsewhere I now realise this performance is fairly typical for this WD product.
However, I am still scratching my head concerning the 485GB backup when I only have 420GB of data to backup. I have restated TM which I assume will complete a full / initial backup once it has determined which files need backing up. I am a little concerned that I may have to wait hours or even days to find out whether my backup has been successful.
I am currently backing up 445 GB (920K items) on Time Machine via ethernet to my Airport Express (Wireless N, Gigabit Ethernet). I am at 9 hours thus far (339 GB of the 445 GB).
Also, will it usually take this amount of time or is this just the time it takes for the first backup?
I will check to see how much GB it shows after it is done backing up to compare.
Thanks for the info’ concerning multiple TM backups and where they are stored. That is a big help to me.
Your other comments have given me food for thought. Since my NAS is connected to a gigabit port on the router then I am wondering if my router is slowing down my backups!
I have used TM umpteen times to backup my laptop to a USB connected drive without any problem. I have also used Carbon Copy Cloner to make bootable backups using a directly connected drive, again without problem, but installing a NAS is my first venture into backing up over a network. If I have configured TM’s Preferences incorrectly then I don’t know where I have gone wrong.
I can copy files between my laptop and my Shares and back again: no problem at all. My problem appears to be with TM.
It seems we are attempting much the same kind of task: 400+GB using TM. At 9 hours and counting, you backing up is faster than mine. Yes, the first TM backup is the longest because every file is backed up. Successive backups are only changed or new files.
I would like to know if your backup completes normally and whether TM then identifies it as the oldest or latest backup. When my backup got to 420GB (over 1.2 million files) it kept going up to 485GB before I stopped it. I didn’t believe what I was seeing. I’m not sure if I have a problem with TM or the NAS or my router. I think my laptop is blameless.
I am not sure how long it took but it did go for a good 20 hour period I believe.
I am currently backing up another computer (MacMini) with an external HDD…so it is taking some time. I did open up TM and it was able to show the previous backups as I had left it running while I went to work and it had done a couple of backups while i was gone. My wife still uses the iMac while I am gone and it kept up with the changes she made on it.
I believe the original backup was around the same amount as my internal HDD on my iMac (455 GB). I will let you know if I encounter any issues as I will be backing up this external HDD with my iPhoto library and Music library on it.
Your laptop may be blameless, but the culprit might be the NAS with RAID 1.
I still have a PC to backup on MBLD. So in total it will be two Macs (iMac and Mac Mini) and a PC laptop on the MBLD. I am putting this NAS to work.
It seems your TM is working OK. I should have thought 20 hours to backup 455GB was quite acceptable. I have used TM with my USB and Firewire ports and I have seen 3GBps second performance but my NAS backups barely rise above 5MBps.
I am pleased to learn that you are seeing Oldest and Latest Backup stats. I have yet to see anything but that is probably because I have still to make that initial backup. I can see the progress bar operating OK.
Yes, it is true, the NAS is the only unproven item in my home network. I have no reason to doubt my router (not yet) which has worked OK for about a year when I purchased it. I have a Billion Bipac 7800N router which has an excellent reputation.
I am gradually coming around to the view that it is my NAS that is the problem but I cannot put my finger on anything definite.
WD Support asked me to perform a hard reset by inserting a small pointed object into the reset hole on the rear of my MBLD. I did this but nothing appears to be different.
I have decided to let Time Machine perform a fresh backup but this time I won’t abort the backup if it appears to overrun. Instead I will wait to see what happens. I will play the waiting game. Resetting the MBLD ‘may’ have had some effect but I won’t know until I have attempted a full TM backup.
I did try a more powerful+sensitive wireless card and substituted it for my Airport card which I powered off. The backup rate increased between 3 - 4x but it was an unsustainable configuration because the Airport driver and the QuickerTek ExpressCard driver conflicted and my MacBook Pro froze and I had to perform a poweroff reset. The freezing occurred within minutes of activating the QuickerTek card. I conclude from this experiment that wireless performance cannot be ignored if TM backups are over a wifi link. I have placed an order for a long range, USB, wifi adapter from Alfa which should dramatically outperform my Airport card.
It will probably be another week before I complete my next set of experiments. Fingers crossed!
So is there a way to get to this time machine particion from windows, if so, how? And is it possible to delete this particiaon? I’m asking because I no longer have the desire to use time machine to back up my iMac, it’s easier for me anyway to just back up the important stuff manually. And to the other posters, I have never done it wirelessly, but my time machine bakup connected via eathernet cable, for 500 GB only took 3 hours. But someone please tell me how to delete this time machine backup particion, either from windows or the mac. It’s taking up space that I need. Thanks.
I have obtained the Alfa long range USB wireless adapter and the transmission is now peaking at over 8MBps which is far faster than my inbuilt Airport adapter. I can also detect many more wireless signals in my vicinity. This result confirms what I previously suspected that a good wi-fi signal is essential for fast backups.
However, what I have to yet to understand and overcome is why is Time Manager backing up over 650GB - and continuing to backup - when I only have 420GB to backup to begin with???
I have used TM hundreds of times without problem over USB and Firewire ‘cabled’ links but this is the first time I have tried backing up wirelessly over a LAN.
I will next try backing up with a cabled link to my router thereby eliminating the wireless component. Will TM then begin to report backup progress correctly? If it does, I will begin to suspect TM has a problem with wireless operation. This outcome would seem to suggest an OS X problem. I am currently running Snow Leopard (10.6.8).
I have no proof that the NAS or the WD Dashboard are malfunctioning, however, the WD Dashboard is continuing to report that I have backed up over 650GB of data and I am wondering if my single ‘initial’ TM backup will fill the entire 3TB!
Is TM ‘really’ backing up my data or is it performing a verification pass or some other task? I wish I could ‘see’ which files TM is backing up as they happen.
I have also tried backing up using Carbon Copy Cloner wirelessly with Airport and it seems to work but it predicts it will take over 6 days to perform the task. But will it ‘overrun’ its backup too? I have several backup utilities that can cope with network backups and I will try each in turn to see which works best. I will check them against wireless and cabled operation.
Frankly, I am becoming suspicious of TM’s ability to cope with wireless backups. I no longer trust what it is reporting in terms of progress or backups completed.
With a cabled Ethernet connection - NO WIRELESS - the backing up peaked at 23Mbps, however, the backing up problems with TM persist. I am also getting a ‘Network Link Down’ warning whenever I launch the WD Dashboard. This warning occurs whether I use a cable link to the router or a wireless link to the router. I have rechecked all physical connections which are A1.
It seems that my backing up problems persist whether I use wireless or cable but using the latter I achieve nearly 3x the performance compared with my high quality wireless link.
I am getting a flashing green light - once per second, approximately - on the front of the WD MBLD.
I have now tried a CAT6 Ethernet cable in place of my wireless link and I’ve even tried using a high power, high sensitivity wi-fi adapter in place of my Airport card and the backing up problem still persists. I have 430GB to back up with Time Machine ™ and the data backed up so far according to both TM and the WD Dasboard is now 802GB … and it is still backing up!!! If I let it continue will the backup fill the whole of the 3TB available? A neverending backup … an information blackhole. I would dearly love to know what data is being backed up. WD Support has asked me to let the backing up continue and report back if there are any changes. Both TM and the WD Dashboard agree on the amount of data being backed up.
I am also getting the ‘Network link down …’ warning window every time I launch the WD Dashboard which I didn’t think I got when I had the default RAID 0 configuration. If there was an intermittent link I feel I would have detected it by now.
I have reset, shutdown and restarted the NAS and monitored the front and rear indicators and they behave exactly as expected, i.e., completely normal. I have also checked all the physical connections and they are all OK too.
Because I previously substituted my wireless connection with a cable and the problem remained, I have concluded that wireless isn’t the cause of my problem.
I have worked my way through every WD Dashboard function and can find no issues. Everything appears to work OK.
I am toying with the idea of reverting to RAID 0 and rerunning all my tests.
I am also keeping an eye open for a software conflict but so far haven’t found one.
I have not ruled out the possibility of a firmware bug in the NAS…
I can copy files between my MacBook Pro and the network share I created and all is OK. It is merely the backup function which appears not to work.
I am keeping my fingers crossed that i will spot a clue very soon.
I have tried using a CAT6 cable in place of wireless to connect my MacBook Pro to my router and this offers the best backing up performance of all, around 23MB/s. I have also tried a high power, high sensitivity Alfa wireless adapter in place of my inbuilt Airport adapter and achieved a peak of 8MB/s. Both these figures give a respectable rather than a brilliant performance.
But what I have not achieved during my trialling is my initial Time Manager backup which has now reached a colossal 938GB when all I have to backup is 421GB.
I temporarily stopped backing up to my NAS in favour of connecting a conventional USB HDD and attempted backing up to it using TM. It successfully completed the task in just 35 minutes. TM performed faultlessly.
There is a pattern beginning to form and that is that all my TM backing up problems began with the introduction of the NAS to my LAN. I have no idea how well TM backs up over a network but it has no trouble with a HDD directly connected to my laptop.
I have sent several reports to WD Support but have yet to receive a solution to my dilemma. I sense they are scratching their heads. Today I was invited to join the WD product test team. I will let you know my decision next time.
The backup has now exceeded 1TB despite having only 421GB to backup. I have dicovered that the WD Dashboard upon reaching 1TB records the NAS storage to the nearest 0.1TB (100GB) which I feel is much too coarse.
I have also discovered evidence of a TM-NAS communication problem. I did this by launching the OS X Console application and listed ‘All Messages’. I then applied the filter ‘backupd’ which is the process associated with Time Manager. Looking down through the list of filtered messages there is clear evidence of a TM-NAS comms problem.
I am beginning to think there is a bug in the NAS firmware because I have since successfully backed up all 421GB to a USB HDD connected directly to my MacBook Pro thus eliminating the network component. As usual, the backup was both faultless and fast.
I have fedback a report to WD Support and included a text file containing the filtered messages. Their technicians hould be able to decode these messages and locate the problem.
I have rejected WD’s offer to join their ‘WDBeta’ product test team.
WD Support has recommended I initiate a ‘FULL FACTORY RESTORE’ which deletes everything on the NAS which then reboots. This process can take several hours.
In their words, a ‘FULL FACTORY RESTORE’ will prove whether the problem is with the NAS and/or its firmware OR the backup software. I reminded them that Time Manager has never failed me.
The FULL FACTORY RESTORE took approximately 3 hours but the subsequent reboot of the NAS was incomplete after 13 hours. This has got to be too long for a reboot! I aborted Safari thus closing the WD Dashboard window, which users are warned not to do until the restore+reboot is complete, and restarted the WD Dashboard which now reports that 45% of the Restore is complete. I no longer believe what the WD Dashboard is reporting.
I am rapidly loosing confidence that I will resolve this problem anytime soon. Things seem to be getting worse, not better.
I have figured out the significance of the 45%. See previous posting. The FULL FACTORY RESTORE is still proceeding but at an incredibly slow rate. Since posting my previous update the count has advanced to 48%. The count is incrementing by 1% approximately every 20 - 30 minutes. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the full restoration process could take between 1 - 2 days to complete. WD’s documentation states ‘it could take hours’ which I regard as a gross understatement. Until the restoration is complete I cannot use the NAS at all. I probably have another 12 - 15 hours to wait.
Does any member know what the restoration process entails? Could it include a full surface scan of each disc because the time involved seems excessively long. I imagine the restoration process includes exhaustive testing of each NAS component.
I am keeping my fingers crossed that the restoration will resolve my original problem, that of Time Manager not succeeeding in making an initial full backup.
Before restoring the NAS I switched TM off using the Preferences slider switch. Curiously I found I could not launch the WD Dashboard unless TM was switched on. I am not sure if this observation is important but it might be.
As I read your posts, you make mention of an additional amount of GBs that are being backed up beyond your “421 GB” hard drive. I believe before you began a Full Factory Restore you mentioned that it had “exceeded 1TB.”
Could it be that TM is also backing up additional external hard drives attached to your MacBook Pro?
You had mentioned that you had manually backed up this 421 GB unto a “USB HDD connected directly to my MacBook Pro.”
As to the process you are in…I have done it already and it took 20+ hours (both doing a restore and then resetting it to a RAID 1 configuration). I would suggest to wait that it “rebuild” to 100% before running TM.
I too am running Snow Leopard (10.6.8), but have never run TM via wireless on my iMac.
