NAS "original item not found"

[FrenchMassacre]

Hi everyone,

So I'm new to the Mac-world, just got a brand new MacBook Pro 15". It's working great and I love it but I'm having some issues with my NAS set-up and my time machine which I hoped you guys could help with.

I have a (3 months old) Netgear Nighthawk R7000 with a hard drive connected to it, two partitions of 500GB, one to be used as additional storage (my mac only has 256GB) and the other for the time machine.

I've formatted the drive to be OSX extended Journaled on both partitions, connected it to the router and the partitions show on my router web interface as being mounted and "sharing". I then set up the time machine to it and could access it the data partition from the left on my finder whenever I was connected to my home wifi. Time machine worked great for about a week.

Now whenever time machine tries to backup I get "The Backup disk image ... could not be accessed (error (null))" The drive in finder also doesn't always show, in fact, finder sometimes doesn't even always show the router itself. When it does show the drives, if I try to open any of them I get the error "The operation can't be completed because the original item for ... can't be found"

The setup on the router seems fine as far as the router lets me see and my flatmate (who has a 6month old 15" MacBook Pro) can access and use the drive without any issues.

The weirdest part is that it sometimes randomly starts working, yesterday for example my mac managed to send 50GB to time machine before I rebooted it and it stop sending. I also managed to put 20GB of my Data drive manually. Now I can't do anything anymore...

First assumed it was due to my VPN (which I'm almost constantly connected to) but yesterday I managed to send data while on VPN and today cannot while disconnected..

If any of you have encountered this issue or know what causes it & how to fix it, please do comment!

Thanks guys really appreciate it.

 

[honestone]

What exact version of Mac OS X are you using?

Also, how much free space is on your internal drive? And, is that internal drive an SSD?

And, what brand/model of the external drive are you using?

Given that your room mate can access the drive, you possibly might have some issues with the cables/connections of the router.

Can you connect the drive directly to the Macbook Pro, and if so, does it work fine, or are you having the same issues? By the way, why do you have the drive connected to the router, instead of directly to the Mac?

 

[FrenchMassacre]

OSx El Capitan 10.11.2, not sure how internal drive free space has anything to do with this but around 170GB free /256GB SSD.

The external drive is a brand new Seagate STEA1000400 (got it for free when buying my mac). Both my mac and my flatmates use the same wifi 5GHz connection to the router and that does not explain why he can access it and I can't or why I only have limited access to it. Cabling issue would make sense if both of us were having problems with the drive. To me this can only be a local issue (a setting or something on my mac).

Connecting the drive directly to the mac works perfectly, I have it connected via the router because I want to use it as a NAS and want to be able to backup daily with time machine without having the drive plugged in the side of my machine all day, it's a laptop so I can move around with it... Being a NAS also allows me to access the data from other devices...

 

[honestone]

OK, got it. Since you are having issues with it not being directly connected, but it works fine via a direct connection, and since you room mates can use the NAS setup as is, then most likely it is a software issue.

Not sure if this will help at all, but OS 10.11.3 came out last week. You can get the OS 10.11.3 Combo Updater from here:

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1859?locale=en_US

One other thing: do you have any third party software installed? And if you do, do you have the latest version of each one? And speaking of that, do you need to use any "NAS-related" software to set up your drive as a "NAS" device? (Please excuse my cryptic way of saying that, as I have no experience at all with NAS setups. My external drives are directly connected to my MacMini (one of them is not plugged in, but I do use it when I make my SuperDuper! backups for both of my machines on Saturdays). For my MacBook Air, I have a nice, slim external case housing a (slow) 1 TB, 5400 rpm Hitachi Drive, and that works well when we travel).