Anyone got experience of Western Digital My Cloud devices

[SteveC]

I will shortly be taking custody^* of a Western Digital My Cloud storage device.
Anyone got any experience with such things?

*: it has already been bought by my re-enactment group so I have no choice about the particular box

[Beardy]

I have one. It’s been pretty much a it and forget solution. I use it primarily as a backup device and Apple Time machine is happy to use it where it hasn’t been with the time capsule I originally bought for such purposes.

[freeflow]

Fit and forget until WD tells you they are pulling the plug on that generation of devices.




How do I know this ....m

[Beardy]

Fit and forget until WD tells you they are pulling the plug on that generation of devices.




How do I know this ....m

short of building your own that's pretty much par for the course these days. 

[SteveC]

That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, at least not for me. The group would then have to upgrade the hardware.

[Mr Larrington]

The only annoying thing about it is that if you want to shut it down – rather than just reboot it – you have to do it from WD's phone/fondleslab app or from the WD Quick View PC app (depends on the model); you can’t do it from the browser interface chiz.

Edited for accuracy…

[Wowbagger]

I'm pretty sure it was one of these that we ordered a year or 3 ago and sent back because it was far too prescriptive in what it did.

[Wowbagger]

https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=117817.msg2570930#msg2570930

There's the thread about it. Most who contributed said it was pretty crap.

[bobb]

I have one. It will be obselete in a couple of months. They've offered 20% off a new one. The problem being that the only models they will give 20% off on are the most expensive ones

I only really use it for automatic backup up photos from my phone. There are plenty of other options for doing that, so I don't think I'll bother getting another. At least not from WD anyway...

[Mr Larrington]

Integrated NAS drives seem to be on the endangered species list anyway; seems They prefer you to buy an enclosure and separate drive(s).  Seagate appear to have already stopped making them.

[Kim]

Obviously I'm well at the molish-my-own end of the spectrum, but I can't help thinking that when it comes to online storage you either want:

a) Something simple and standards-based (SMB, NFS, SFTP, etc) on your LAN, that doesn't depend on an internet service for continued operation.  An external disk might be appropriate and less pain than a NAS, especially if The Devil's Radio is involved.

or

b) Something completely in the cloud, where you're paying the service provider for their continued provision of a service.  (Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, cheap VPS in eastern Europe, etc)


What you don't want to rely on is an internet service that's funded by the continued sales of widgets.  Because the inevitable will happen.

[SteveC]

I've not been involved with the decision making over what to get. The problem is that the part of the re-enactment organisation which wants to use this is a limited company, so a lot of the 'free' services are unavailable. Why they decided on an NAS instead of a corporate Dropbox account or whatever, I have no idea. I assume there were good reasons.
We will see how we get on. Thanks for all the comments.

[Mr Larrington]

You can safely ignore all the extra gubbins that comes with the My Cloud hardware (and stops working when WD decide it’s too much hassle to support) and just treat it as a common-or-garden NAS.  The more recent models don’t allow you to change its name, so you’re stuck with having something ghastly like \\MYCLOUD-0RDEXX appearing on your network instead of \\MRCREOSOTE.

[redshift]

The only annoying thing about it is that if you want to shut it down – rather than just reboot it – you have to do it from WD's phone/fondleslab app or from the WD Quick View PC app (depends on the model); you can’t do it from the browser interface chiz.

Edited for accuracy…

<divert>
You can do this on ours by altering the html on the correct page to reinstate the shutdown command.  Eventually, I thought I'd get around to making a permanent alteration, but the whole 'getting into the box via SSH and editing the code' is...meh. Ennui.  You know how it is.

Anyway,  if you right-click|inspect element on the reboot link, you can then (in the code preview in Firefox, at least) change the 'display none'  to 'display block' and get your shutdown command back.
</divert>

They're not great, and our proper local NAS does all the heavy lifting.

[Mr Larrington]

Interesting, though not interesting enough to make me want to try faffing with the internals.  NAS drives on TowersNet only get powered off if they’re being moved or if I'm going on holibobs for more than a week or so.

[drossall]

I posted in the other thread linked above. Since then, I have switched to the Acronis software, which is better I think.

The actual box suffers from feature bloat a bit. I just wanted a network drive for backups. The media server and ability for remote access just opens up unnecessary security considerations and was never of any use or interest. As I understand it, that's where the issues are that are making the product unsupported now. As long as you've shut it down to do the basic job that you probably bought it for in the first place, and filled any hole that you knocked in your firewall to allow it to do more, you should be OK. But I confess that I do need to read in a bit more detail to be sure of that, so don't take it as gospel.

[Mr Larrington]

I'm pretty sure ^^^^ that’s right.  I've never bothered to implement or sign up for all the remote access gubbins that comes with WD and Seagate NAS boxes but they still work fine.  MRCREOSOTE, the target for all my backups, is a WD My Cloud and works just fine with the Macrium Reflect backup program.

I did try Acronis for a while, but it was a a flaky and unreliable Rubbish.  This Unit would not endorse it.

[Kim]

Remote access is what SSH/SFTP are for.  Or a VPN if you want to be posh.  Definitely no need for dubious cloudy shite.

[ian]

Yes, but those are things that computery people say, and everyone else just looks at one another and mutters me neither.

[Kim]

Yeabut who has a non-computery reason to need remote access that wouldn't be better served by, I dunno, Google Photos or Dropbox?  Not many, and they'd be better off hiring a computery person (for actual money) to set them up with and support what they need rather than impulse-buying some off-the-shelf shiny thing that causes all sorts of other problems.

[Mr Larrington]

Not this Unit, that’s for sure.  Anything that needs to go on the NAS can be put there when I get home.  Anything that needs to come off the NAS will have done so before I left.  And the prospect of trying to access it over terrible hotel Internets should be enough to put most people off in the first place.

[Kim]

I have, very rarely, found it useful to be able to SFTP to home in order to plagiarise some config file when sorting out someone else's computer problems.

Other than that, I've only really done it in order to back up GPX files while touring.  And it's not like there aren't a dozen other ways to achieve that.

Though there was that time I helped Hanananananah the Astrononononomer liberate 800 megabytes of spectrographs using SFTP-over-wet-string from an ageing Solaris box at the top of a mountain, because her telescope time ended that morning and it turns out that astrononononomers are just as bad at data storage solutions as everyone else...

[SteveC]

Unfortunately, the only reason for getting this box is for the remote access.
The re-enactment group is a not for profit company, so we can't use the personal services.
I assume the board looked into possibilities and came to the conclusion that the My Cloud was the best option.
I wasn't party to the decision and I don't know how computer-literate the directors are. 

Wish me luck!