Time Machine backups

[philharve]

UPDATE

I am currently working with Intego Support (Intego Virus Barrier X6) and WD Support to try and resolve what may turn out to be a software conflict. I am still waiting to make the important initial TM backup of around 400GB.

I have sent WD Support some short movie clips of what I am seeing, including a list of running processes, in the hope that maybe they will spot an erroneous or maybe a missing process that is interfering with the backing up. WD Support have identified 5 processes that maybe interfering and I am taking a closer look at them. I have deleted an old LaCie Backup application that dates from 2006 which I no longer use. I am looking at other backup applications I have but seldom use.

[BrettM]

Phil,

An extraordinary rigmarole you have been forced to go through in an attempt to resolve your Time machine backup problems.

I arrived here after experiencing worrying problems with Time Machine of my own.   I purchased my MBLD 4Tb some 3-4 weeks ago, and configured it as Raid 1. 

I set up Time machine from my iMac (Lion) and wife’s Mac Book air.   The backups of these seemed to work,  but were slow to complete the first one.

I didn’t pay much attention after that because I’ve been having big problems with the DLNA server on this unit (see the other threads on DLNA),  however yesterday  the iMac’s Time machine issued some message indicating that the it has done a “verification of the backups” and needed to commence a new one from scratch (or something of that nature).

The end result is that it has completely clobbered the last few weeks of Time Machine backups, and is now starting again.

However like you - the backup is now painfully slow.    only 160GB, Yet last night it reported it would take 10 hours.  This morning,  it has done roughly half of the backups, and still reports another 11 hour to go.

It claims I have over  800,000 files to back up - which frankly I don’t believe.  I can’t believe there are that many files on my system.

My MBLD is LAN connected, using DHCP,  and I do not use a virus checker, but do run two firewall apps (for different purposes) -These however do not interfere with LAN traffic.

It is very disconcerting, that my earlier backups have been wiped, and now the new backup is behaving so poorly -  It makes me worry that should I need to restore at any time, that the backup will be irretrievable.

Given my experiences with the buggy nature of WD’s DLNA server, I am inclined to believe that it is the WD implementation of the server side of Time Machine backup that is failing us here - and I am at the point where I wouldn’t trust it even if it said all was fine.

The fact that the Dashboard does not allow the user to browse thebackup-partitions, and see the  actual backup files on the disks (ie the full history of backups - ike you can on a USB c onnected drive),  means that we just have to trust that the MBLD has done its job, and that what is reported on the Dashboard is what has really happened.  I’m now sceptical to say the least.

I’ts getting close to a return back to the shop and a refund for me I’m afraid.

Brett

Aus.

[philharve]

Hi Brett

After 6 months of ownership I am no further forward resolving my Time Machine ™ backup problem and the support I was offered has apparently dried up.

Drag-copying still works brilliantly and with a cabled connection to the router I can achieve copying speeds of 1GBpm. In theory if TM was working at these speeds I could easily backup my 426GB overnight. But if I use a wireless link of any kind the drag-copying speed falls dramatically. I still haven’t achieved the initial backup with TM which seems to malfunction almost from the word go. Strange, since drag-copying works so well it can only mean that my local network and its connections are in great shaape so the physical network can be ruled out from my list of possible problems.

I have never seen the warning message you mention.

My attempts at TM backups must now number at least 2 dozen times. The process can be so slow that it can take a couple weeks to achieve the 400GB+ mark only to find that the backing up keeps on going and in one instance went up to 1.1TB before I terminated the process. I have no confidence that TM is properly integrated into the WD software & firmware.

I am presently looking at the possibility of a software conflict. I do have several other backup programs which might be the cause but testing is a slow process. Generally if I no longer use an application I will remove it, however, this can create a dilemma. For example, I have Intego’s Virus Barrier X6 which has its own backup utility. I cannot simply delete VBX6 if it should prove to be a ‘conflicter’ with the WD application.

I have a feeling another expert Forum member will eventually stumble upon the problem and arrive at a solution. I am not confident that WD Support can fix this issue alone.

In frustration I have reviewed this product on the Amazon website and given it 1-Star because it drag-copies to perfection. It took me 6 months to finally publish my review. As for TM backups I’m afraid it is a non-starter even though some owners report no issues.

I have been reading reports that Apple’s Time Capsule maybe a better NAS option. Just a thought.

[philharve]

UPDATE … a +ve development!

I thought I would try a Time Manager backup of my new i7 MacBook Pro today which prior to the 25th July was running Lion but is now running Mountain Lion. I could not get Lion to perform a TM backup to the WD NAS. The results were virtually identical to those obtained with my older ‘early 2006’ MBP running Snow Leopard

This morning I find that TM backups from my i7 to the NAS appear to be working. I have performed a handful of manually initiated backups and each backup was performed relatively quickly and apparently reliably, probably because I’m using a cable rather than wireless. There is no backup ‘overrunning’ and I now have ‘oldest’ and ‘latest’ backup dates. During one backup I even drag-copied a group of files from the NAS back to my MBP. This bidirectional data transfer appears to have been successful!

I attempted another fresh backup from my 2006 MBP thinking (and hoping) that maybe it will now work. No such luck, it still won’t work, however, drag-copying in either direction works fine and fast.

I still can’t believe the Mountain Lion has succeeded where Lion and Snow Leopard have failed. I will be studying this unexpected development closely.

I think this +ve result means there is nothing wrong with my physical network and I might now be able to eliminate the NAS and it software and firmware from the problem equation. They have not changed apart from a recent firmware update. It would seem the culprit is probably software related - I always thought so - and it has something to do with Lion and/or Snow Leopard and/or TM and/or the WD UI software. However, since I am using the same WD UI software on both my MBPs, this tends to suggest a problem lies with the O/S or TM or their integration with the WD UI. I have not ruled out the possibility of a third party software conflict. I have vastly more applications on my older Mac’ than my i7.

I now need to identify the differences between my MBPs. I am happy that there isn’t a hardware problem with either Mac’ which realitically only leaves a software problem. I still cannot decide if the ball has fallen in the Apple or WD court.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that today’s improvement is permanent. I have waited for over 6 months for something like this to happen.

[philharve]

UPDATE

I have just noticed that the WDQuickView Preferences settings do not stick. I set QuickView to start and display its icon in the menu bar (System Preferences) but this setting switches back to the opposite setting following a restart. I looked in my login items (Accounts) and I felt sure there was a WD QuickView entry in the list. If there was, it isn’t there now. 

I wonder if I have discovered a problem with WD QuickView preferences. 

[philharve]

UPDATE

I have spotted the existence of another WD software product on my older MBP. It is called WD Smartware and its purpose appears to be automatically scan a hard drive in order to backup new or changed data files. I believe it runs in the background monitoring changes.

I believe this application was installed as part of another WD product I purchased a couple years ago, a 2TB USB+Firewire HDD which I have been using as a fast backup (3GBpm) device. I do not use WD Smartware on my newer i7 MBP.

Since Smartware and Quickview are both products from WD, I wonder if they are capable of conflicting with one another? Has any member experience of using these two applications together? Maybe only one is necessary!

[philharve]

UPDATE

My latest TM backup failed once again, it overran the target 426GB and I terminated the backup at 430GB following which I deleted it.

I initiated a fresh backup and it appeared to be progressing normally and quickly and an overnight backup seemed likely. However, at around 100GB my MBP froze and I had to perform a restart. Upon reinitialising TM the backup progress seemed to falter, it became more erratic, impulsive with longer periods of apparent inactivity, in effect the backing up slowed down.

I am wondering if the crash introduced a discontinuity in the backing up process from which TM was unable to recover correctly. If this has happened then the result may well cause the backup to falter and overrun.

It was my impression that a TM backup could be interrupted by a normal shutdown or a restart or even a crash. I further assumed that after a reinitialisation TM would perform a verification of the data already transferred before recommencing the backup from the point at which the interruption occurred. Maybe my impression and assumption are wrong.

If the crash had not occurred would I have achieved my first initial backup by morning? The answer to that question is now academic and I will have to wait until my next completed backup to find out.

I am not sure why my Mac’ freezes but following a restart I am not offered the opportunity to submit a crash report to Apple.

[BrettM]

Phil, 

I’ve seen the Quickview Pref setting dissapear also on my wifes/ macbook air (Lion),  but not on my iMac (Lion).  Havn’'t tried to investigate yet though

I thought the WD Smartware was a Wintel app - so can’t see why it would even run - let alone creat a conflict.

As for the ongoing failure of Timemachine backups -  I do not trust the WD NAS to do it properly.  I purchased a Seagate drive connected by USB to my iMac and now no problems.    A dissapointing outcome for the NAS

The NAS is now just a DLNA server on my network, I don’t trust it with any other job, and I even had to replace WDs native DLNA with a 3rd party product to get that working.

On the plus side - Team GB is kicking Aussie tush so you must be happy.

Brett - Aus

[philharve]

Hi Brett

I have noted your comments and especially your mistrust of the WD NAS. I went through a similar phase of mistrusting everything to do with the WD NAS but everything appears to work OK except Time Manager’s ability to backup properly.

I have another issue with remote access but first things first.

I am currently performing a TM backup of my MBP i7, running Mountain Lion, and it is predicting around 4 hours to backup over 70GB which seems a little slow to me but if it achieves its goal I will feel a little happier. I have performed several manually initiated TM backups of the i7 and they went smoothly. I thought these backups were faster.

I have noticed one big difference between TM on my 2006 MBP and TM on my i7 … each performs a file count before the backup commences but TM on the i7 decrements the file count as the backup progresses. The file count on my 2006 MBP does not decrement during backing up. This must be an important clue!

[philharve]

UPDATE

My i7 MBP running Mountain Lion is successfully backing up automatically. I previously reported it would perform a manually initiated TM backup too.

Why is it that Mountain Lion works with the WD NAS and, apparently, earlier versions of the O/S do not? 

[philharve]

UPDATE

With a cabled connection I am successfully drag-copying files between my old MBP and NAS at 80MBps, which is plenty fast enough. 

The backup counter in TM refuses to budge from the maximum file count number when attempting to backup to the NAS but it decrements towards ‘0’ when making a local TM backup, i.e., to a USB-connected drive attached to my MBP.

I am experiencing unexplained ‘freezes’ in which everything, including the cursor, freezes necessitating a restart. I don’t think this has anything to do with the TM backup problem but its appearance at this time makes NAS testing very difficult. Despite exhaustive tests I can find no software-related causes for the freezing.

[philharve]

UPDATE

An emergency situation arose today in which I risked losing my entire email database. I maintain a backup of my email database using MailSteward on my early 2006 MBP. Today I used MailSteward to create an emergency backup on the WD NAS and the export went smoothly and surprisingly quickly (ave. 40MBps). I then moved the backup from the NAS to my i7 MacBook Pro using MailSteward’s ‘Merge Database’ feature. Once again the process ran smoothly and quickly.  I now all my emails (approx. 100,000) backed up on both MBPs, not fogetting the NAS, and without a hint of a problem. MailSteward (on different MBPs) is my first application to successfully transfer data to and from the NAS demonstrating the WD NAS will work. I wonder why TM on my early MBP will not work but TM on my i7 will work?

[philharve]

UPDATE

Yippee - I have a backup but NOT by using Time Machine!

I have several backup applications and I thought I would give Super Duper a try. At the first attempt I created a 220GB sparseimage of my user directory within my network share, an overnight task. I used a cabled connection to the router and achieved an average rate of 46MBps. 

WD Support has approached me once again to offer me their assistance. I was approached once before but the support soon fizzled out. At least I have achieved a positive result but not one I was expecting.

The question remains, ‘why does TM not work?’

[philharve]

UPDATE

I forgot to mention that twice during the period I have owned my 6TB MBLD, approximately 8 months, the unit has gone to sleep (steady blue light) and there is no obvious way of waking it except by repowering it which requires human intervention.

Is this behaviour normal because if (or when) I get around to setting up my own Cloud server, having the MBLD go to sleep could be very inconvenient? I would not be able to backup or retrieve information.

[Malbrouck]

Hi Phil,

I also have a 6TB MBLD and time machine is very slow. It takes me more than a week to complete a 1.5 TB backup.

I have several Macs backed up on this unit and besides the slowness it’s working ok.

I’m using mountain lion where time machine supports multiple backup hard drives. This way I have backups on the MBLD and a USB HD.

While a time machine backup was running I discovered there was a script running on the MBLD: /usr/local/sbin/monitorio.sh and this script is using the “du” command. A “vmstat 1” showned a lot of bi and bo.

I killed the du process and it seemed to help a bit regarding the speed of the time machine backup.

[Malbrouck]

OK I think I found the guilty one: /usr/local/sbin/monitorio.sh

This script is spawning a du command every minute. A solution to have good time machine performance on MBLD is to kill it:

• enable SSH access on your MBLD

• login as root

• run “killall monitorio.sh”

Let me know if this works for you. Note I don’t know yet what are the side effects of stopping this process on your MBLD. If you choose to do this it’s at your own risks.

[philharve]

Hi Malbrouck

I can sympathize with your slow backing up problem which in my case was even slower. It took around 1 - 2 weeks to backup a mere 420GB. However, I was to discover that the ‘backup’ was not a true backup, instead there was an endless transfer of data occurring between my MBPs and the NAS. I have no idea what that data contained.

You say your backup was ‘very slow’ under TM but I infer from your comment that at least it did complete successfully. I have never gotten this far.

WRT speed … cable yields the fastest result and I will in future use cable for large / initial backups. I am happy to use wi-fi for smaller quantities of data.

Both my MBPs backup to USB / Firewire HDDs using TM successfully regardless of which operating system was in use. It was only when I added the NAS that things started to go wrong. However, TM backups to the NAS work under Mountain Lion but not Lion or Snow Leopard. I am beginning to think the problem lies in Apple’s court!

Your comments regarding scripts interest me. I have encountered ‘vmstat 1’ before. I need to take a closer look at them to see what they do. I will try killing them too to see what happens.

[philharve]

Hi Malbrouck

Do you know what your procedure is doing?

If your procedure works then I wonder why WD Support has not suggested something similar to me!

I have automated my daily archiving of my emails to the NAS and a 13GB file is transferred in a little over 5 minutes. This is brilliant because it proves the NAS is capable of operating at these speeds. My ‘physical’ network connection routing must be OK which leaves a software and/or firmware issue.

I now have 2 applications which work with the WD NAS but neither is Time Machine EXCEPT under Moutain Lion. 

[Malbrouck]

Hi Phil,

I confirm I could successfully complete TM backups of Macs running OSX 10.6.8, 10.7.4 and 10.8 on my MBLD (and it took days). I’ve also seen the transferred size exceeding the backup size (mybe due to packet retransmission ?) but never had to restore data from the MBLD TM backups so far.

I got a quick look into the monitorio.sh script and I believe it’s quite safe to disable it. This scripts checks for inactivity and puts the NAS in standby when not used for a while. So by killing it you also remove this feature and your NAS will always be powered-on (which might be a good reason for WD to not recommend to do so).

I think it’s worth a try. I’d like to hear some feedback about this hack from people using Time Machine on the MBLD.

All I can say is that it greatly improved performance for writing TM backup on my system.

By the way I’ve read here and there TM was [Deleted]. I personally find this backup software wonderful and I already used it to recover data/system a couple of times in the past (but on external USB disk only)…

[philharve]

UPDATE

Yippee (again) - I have just backed up my user directory (220GB) in 3hr 20min using Apple Backup.

After a little pruning to get rid of redundant and duplicate files and a thinning out of the number of items on the Desktop I am no closer to getting Time Machine to work with the WD NAS. However, I have now discovered 3 applications which will work with the NAS.