My hard drive’s app breaks backups

QSince updating to macOS 10.13.4, Time Machine has stopped backing up to my 2TB WD My Book. I now see a message that an error occurred ‘while creating the backup folder’. The drive checks out as healthy in Disk Utility, and this hasn’t resolved despite installing further macOS updates. What’s wrong? by Chris Wit hey

AIf you have installed the WD Drive Utilities app supplied by Western Digital, the first thing to try is updating it to the latest version. You can download it from the manufacturer’s site, specifically from bit.ly/mfwdcutil.

If that doesn’t restore normal backup function, remove all Western Digital software from your Mac, including its Drive Utilities using the supplied uninstaller. You may need to manually remove a residual helper file from /Users/[your username]/Library/Launch Daemons. Restart your Mac and you should find backups run without further glitches.

Unfortunately, third-party storage utilities like this one all too frequently clash with Time Machine – and sometimes with other features of macOS as well.

If you have problems with Time Machine when using third-party drive utilities, first update to the latest version of those tools.

If you still can’t get backups to work reliably, run the software’s uninstaller to remove it completely.