May 1, 2016

WD myCloud and TimeMachine - (finally) a fast backup

Fiddling around with many settings and being quite annoyed by the incredibly slow backups with MacOS 10.11 (often one day was not enough to do an incremental backup) on my WD myCloud, I finally found the solution accidentally. Thanks and kudos to StackExchange where I found the solution. Backup without emergency brake on. I post the necessary commands here just for sake of this blog being my external memory.
The actual problem is, that MacOS throttles accesses of TimeMachine. You can verify this by casting the command (all commands have to be used in a terminal)
sudo fs_usage backupd
You will see quite a lot of file transfers being throttled. In order to switch off throttling you need to cast the command
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0
If you want to switch back to the original behaviour (maybe because reaction of your Mac becomes sluggish during backup) you can do so by casting
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=1  
By the way: After a reboot of the Mac the debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled is defaultet back to 1. If anyone knows how to default it to 0 for all times, I'm happy to know.

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