USB backup from Sharespace to ext USB HD

Biggles_1071 · December 14, 2009, 11:01pm

In the WD management software (GUI, it would appear that I can only select “none” or “one” of my shares to be backed up to USB.

How do I make it back up all shares on hitting the USB backup button for 3 sec?

Doing one at a time is silly, and time consuming and means I am likely to miss something.

Any help?

cerver · December 17, 2009, 1:53pm

i also wonder the same thing. why is there not a backup program that will do incremental backups of the sharespace to a external USB drive of multiple directories.

WDuserNM · March 11, 2010, 6:39pm

There is no way to back-up multiple folders.

I currently have a Buffalo Terastation that I wanted to replace with the WD ShareSpace. On the Terastation I’m able to choose multiple folders and set the Terastation to back-up on a specified day and time each week to an external HDD. This option is NOT available on the WD ShareSpace.

It seems like a simple enough option, so I called Western Digital technical support (1-800-275-4932, North America) and told them I wanted to back-up 20 folders that I created (1 folder for every user that is backing up to the WD ShareSpace) to an external HDD and they said it wasn’t possible, the WD ShareSpace is only programmed to back-up 1 folder that you choose. When researching a new NAS device I was looking for one that would be able to back-up to an external USB device, which this produce does, but in everything I read, it didn’t mention the 1 folder limitation.

I’m now trying to get a RMA from the company where I purchased the WD ShareSpace so I can purchase a newer Buffalo Terastation and am able to back-up again.

Rappo · April 27, 2010, 6:12am

Hi.

I too am having issues backing up files from the ShareSpace to a USB device. I added my drives to the SharSpace and now want to Raid all the drives, but need to do a backup and then restore after reconfiguring.

I contacted support and basically the mechanism described above is there only way.

How useless is this. You can use your PC and copy files from one drive to the other, but this is slower than a wet week. I mean, I am lucky to get a couple of hundred Kbytes per second transfer, when the Sharespace is connected on 1G and the USB is USB2 so must be a couple of hundred Mbps.

Why is there not a proceedure in the ShareSpace interface to do a copy??? Is this too hard???

Come on WD, lift your act. Give us some better tools…

Anyone know of anything that can be done to the Web Interface to get these features?

acidrop · April 27, 2010, 4:29pm

Hello I’m facing the same problem with you. I have 4TB model and currently there are about of 500GB of data inside it. I would like to schedule backup to an external hdd or another NAS device daily so i can have history of my files. As i can see on web interface there is an SSH access option. I enabled it and logged in using putty.Basicly WD uses a small linux distro. I saw also that there is a cron job scheduler inside so in theory there must be a way to write a script in linux which will do the copy job, but we must find someone to do it!

Rappo · April 29, 2010, 12:45am

Adding to the poor throughput, with the external drive connected to the USB port on the Sharespace, and using W7 to do the copy from the Sharespace drives to the USB drive, I am lucky to see 100kBps transfers.

But, if I connect the external drive to teh PC USB port, and do the copies, I see transfers up to 7 to 10 MBps. A hugh improvement, but far less than I would have expected, given both are connected to the switch on 1Gbps ports.

Also, has anyone tried to use FTP to move the files for the Sharespace drive to the ShareSpace USB drive? Is it possible to do this internally within the Sharespace, and if so, would it be faster. I feel ShareSpace is using CIFS in a lot of it’s copies and this is a very slow protocol.