Need Help with WD My Book 8T Problems

Just purchased the My Book 8T. Out of box, plugged into my iMac running OS 10.13.3 and seemed to work fine. After a few hours my iMac would not recognize the external 8T drive so I had to reformat it (I think it was exfat?). Anyway, all seemed fine and after the first overnight run, it backed up my iMac without any problems. Now I keep getting 8T Backup Failed messages?

Other background…I also have an older My Book 1TB drive that I also wanted to add to the routine nightly backup but I could not add it to the backup list without erasing everything first. So I copied everything on the drive to the 8T and noticed some of the files had a grey pie shaped symbol at the end of the file name (not a grey circle…a grey pie or clock shape?). I did not recognize this so I never deleted the 1TB because I wanted to see what happened.

That leaves me to now…8T not backing up anymore and I don’t know why. I look at details and it just said it ran into an error while trying to back up?

What I don’t know is when I copied stuff to the 8T…did that somehow mess up the automatic backup with Time Machine?

I also don’t know if when I formatted the 8T; did I need to partition it? I don’t know what that means and why you would want to do that? Would partitioning make part of the 8T available for Time Machine backup and part of the 8T available for me just coping files to the 8T?

Appreciate any help or comments. Thanks.

Hi big42156,

Unfortunately, Time Machine does not support exFAT file system. You have to format the drive in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in order to use it with Time Machine.