I have an EX4100, and I see WD are still selling it and it still claims TimeMachine support.
I’ve been using it on Catalina but since the upgrade it’s become so sloooooow. I had specified the NAS tmutil setdestination as afp://… and it was working on OS versions up to Mojave. Then since Catalina upgrade one backup finishes and then another begins. Permanent disk activity.
Here’s the thing… I notice that if I turn on “Time Machine support” on the General settings page; then go to Network settings and turn off AFP, leaving only SMB active, then when I get back to the General settings page the “Time Machine support” button has been turned off again.
What’s going on? Apple confirm that only SMB is supported, not AFP. Also confirmed by this 2018 article:
If anyone can shed any light I’d be hugely grateful.
Thanks for responding. No luck. Have tried via WD GUI to enable/disable time machine and turn off AFP but the the GUI links the AFP ie. turning off AFP turns off the service resulting in backups failing as the MacOS application cannot see the share. The MacOS finder can always see the share but disabling AFP disables the backup process.
Existing backup which commenced in July 2020 and has incremental backups run without fault which appeared to work via SMB under prior WD OS. This only broke with the OS upgrade.
This is not a reliable nor permanent solution to the problem of configuring permanent SMB Time Machine backups on MacOS widely identified on your support site and other social media with your products.