Who may help me in deleting sparsebundle files (Apple Time Machine) out of my WD My Cloud Home Duo?
Dear Schnaggel .
I have the same problem
On my MacBook Pro ( late 2016) I had suddenly problems with synchronizing with MYCLOUY Home Duo . Try everything (Newstart: Macbook, MYCLOUD ) The Macbook says: delete you sparsebundles. before start again. But is was not possible to delete sparsebundles. I talked with a senior advisor of Apple woh tries for an hour . Het went deep into the terminals but could also not delete it .
Schnaggel do you get help. Wat was the trick to delete them !!? OR can somebody help her? cheers. H
Dear Harry2019,
in my case Apple Support (Second level) helped me out for the first time (using special commands in Terminal). Second time they said that this is not their problem pointing to WD.
My solution: I stopped using this NAS and bought a separate external HD for using my TimeMachine Backup.
Best regards, Jörg
Thanks Jörg,
I have the same experience
I am satisfied a about this NAS, so the question is here ; can WD help here . It is probably a NAS problem not an Apple/Macbook problem
I hope designers, Helpdesk of WD is reading this communication and can help
herzliche Grüsse
Harry
Terminal and sudo will be your friend there.
I am satisfied with other WD drives, but with MyCloud EX2 there are problems with TimeMachine. Sometimes backups inexplicably fail and the sparsebundle file becomes useless. The fast fix is to hide the file in a folder and create a new one. But once the disk is full, there is no way to delete the spoiled files. I urgently need a solution for this problem.
I can still not delete the sparse bundles on my home Duo. Had again contact with a second-level Supervisor of Apple because I get the advice of AUSTIN FOREST: Mini-tutorial: Force-deleting stubborn or problematic files in Mac OS X - CNET
This was already done by the apple advisor but we still not good delete it !! Then he found on the internet that probably the IP ADRES has to be changed of the HOME DUO otherwise the sparse bundles stay on it . Together with the Apple supervisor, we searched to the IP Address but could not find it
Tries to call the 00800-27549338. ( WD Support Netherlands). but NOBODY comes on. the telephone. WERE IS THE SERVICE. OF WD HERE!
Can somebody help here
regards. Harry
Bonjour,
Ok, I know it’s been a while since this problem has been posted but I wanted to share the solution I just found so anyone can delete those files. Long story short : You have to log on your cloud using FTP.
First, you have to enable it!
Long into your local cloud. It should be http://wdmycloud.local
Then go to settings / network (sorry if the word are not the same. I use the french version.)
Enable FTP
Afterward you go to Shared Folders and select the Time Machine Backup folder.
You enable FTP on it. MAKE SURE YOU GIVE EVERY RIGHTS so you can delete the files.
Finally, use your FTP client to login and you will be able to delete those files.
It should work perfectly. 
I have a MyCloud EX2 Ultra and cannot delete the Sparsebundle. I am not that savvy about FTP. I was able to change the Locations and turn on FTP but don’t know what to do next!! Any help would be appreciated. I have a Mac
The MyCloud OS has a miserable bug in their SMB server implementation. Not only is deleting a backupbundle or sparsebundle exhaustingly slow, but the directories Time Machine uses are so huge that the server just crashes and disconnects you.
Fix: On a Mac, use NFS. First, on the MyCloud, disable Time Machine backups. In settings, enable NFS (you can set the host machine if you like) and enable writes. It will show you the NFS server URL after that.
Paste that into the dialog in Go → Connect To Server… and your Mac will mount the MyCloud just like it does with the SMB - but now you can delete things successfully, and it’s “wicked fast” by comparison to SMB.
NFS (this way, at least) is less secure, so disable NFS when you’re done.
P.S. TimeMachine completely ignores the standard UNIX convention of not having too many files in a single directory - for many filesystems, directory lookups are linear searches, so this is miserable. They should have sharded this, especially the “bands” directory, into smaller parts: bands/01a/d08 instead of bands/01ad08. It’s not completely WD’s fault - something in the SMB server is just running out of memory trying to enumerate all those files.
Sparse bundles don’t have ECC
I bring one disappointment, though. In this article, I wondered whether the sparse bundle format used error-correcting code to improve resilience against corruption. Sadly, I can find no evidence of that from looking through the storage bands inside sparse bundles. Instead, they contain a lot of unused space, frequent repetition of similar data structures which might even amount to redundancy, even a hidden EFI volume, which enable them to withstand substantial amounts of corruption across much of their length. But if any of the file system structures within the bands are damaged, the sparse bundle will be irrevocably broken. They’re not smart, just lucky.
The future
Despite their widespread use and advantages, macOS features supporting the use of APFS-format sparse bundles are at present riddled with bugs (I count 6 above) and have serious shortcomings. Their inability to self-compact is a major failing which makes their use clumsy at best, and Disk Utility’s lack of support for basic maintenance functions through the last 2.5 years reflects badly on Apple’s engineering priorities. Disk Utility remains of early beta-test quality and far from complete.
