WD personal "my cloud" hard drives: Is anyone familiar with the WD "my cloud" hard drives? I'm thinking about loading up one of those with my pics and keeping it at my sisters house.

brian43053 Loc: Buffalo, NY

Is anyone familiar with the WD "my cloud" hard drives? I'm thinking about loading up one of those with my pics and keeping it at my sisters house. Would I be able to access anything on that drive from my house? I've had conflicting answers from different people at best buy. I even contacted WD and got 2 different answers from 2 different people!! (now that's scary!!)

jmizera Loc: Austin Texas

I actually recommended one of these to a friend a couple of years ago. It failed recently, and would not boot. I was hopeful that the data could be recovered, and removed the drive. I knew it was a Linux formatted disk, but was unable to mount it.

Tried several recovery tools, no good. Looks like the backups were lost completely.

brian43053 Loc: Buffalo, NY

that's not very encouraging. were you able to access it remotely?

jmizera Loc: Austin Texas

brian43053 wrote:

that's not very encouraging. were you able to access it remotely?

Well no. Basically, the device is a very small computer with a standard SATA hard drive inside. The computer portion died, so I extracted the drive. I tried multiple methods to recover the data, and all failed.

Remote access relies on the inbuilt computer contacting via the WD servers. The data is only stored on the physical drive.

Frankly, I would prefer actual cloud storage such as Google, Amazon, or Dropbox if its in your budget.

brucewells Loc: Central Kentucky

brian43053 wrote:

Is anyone familiar with the WD "my cloud" hard drives? I'm thinking about loading up one of those with my pics and keeping it at my sisters house. Would I be able to access anything on that drive from my house? I've had conflicting answers from different people at best buy. I even contacted WD and got 2 different answers from 2 different people!! (now that's scary!!)

I've had one for over a year, with relative success. I had an issue accessing it with anything other than my iPhone/iPad when I was away from home (such as my work PC). But, I finally gave WD a call and the guy helped me through some configuration issues. Now, it's easy to access it.

An issue you cannot get away from, however, is that your ISP at home doesn't give you much uplink bandwidth. Therefore, if you are remote, on a PC and request a file to be brought to you, it will take a bit of time for that to happen.

They are inexpensive and will not perform as fast as you might want them to.

brian43053 Loc: Buffalo, NY

how fast do they work if you try to send more info to them - say additional pics?

jdubu Loc: San Jose, CA

I use Synology nas drives. I have found them to be really bulletproof so far. (1 year and running)

Currently, I have 2 separate systems, one at home for my photography and one at our office for my wife's interior design business. Both have two 3tb WD red drives in them that mirror each other, so if one drive goes down, there is a twin copy backup. There are different RAID configurations, but I find this is the simplest for me. Plus the ability to add expansion units for additional drives is great.

I can access either from any location and my portable devices as needed.

For offsite backup, I keep another usb hard drive at home and office that has a third copy of the other locations Synology file.

The reviews of all the different systems led me to Synology and I have heartily recommend them as a satisfied user.

brucewells Loc: Central Kentucky

brian43053 wrote:

how fast do they work if you try to send more info to them - say additional pics?

I have never attempted sending a file to the drive, so cannot answer that one. Sorry.

amehta Loc: Boston

brian43053 wrote:

Is anyone familiar with the WD "my cloud" hard drives? I'm thinking about loading up one of those with my pics and keeping it at my sisters house. Would I be able to access anything on that drive from my house? I've had conflicting answers from different people at best buy. I even contacted WD and got 2 different answers from 2 different people!! (now that's scary!!)

I just got two of these to set up a home NAS, one for my photos and one for other stuff (music, videos, etc). They are pretty easy to set up, and they have a USB 3.0 port so I also got regular WD MyBook drives to use as back-ups.

Yes, you could keep one at your sister's house and access anything from your house. The speed would depend much more on your sister's upload speed than anything else.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

brian43053 wrote:

Is anyone familiar with the WD "my cloud" hard drives? I'm thinking about loading up one of those with my pics and keeping it at my sisters house. Would I be able to access anything on that drive from my house? I've had conflicting answers from different people at best buy. I even contacted WD and got 2 different answers from 2 different people!! (now that's scary!!)

I considered getting one of these, but didn't. I emailed WD to ask what "color" drive was inside, and the answer was Green, their lower level drive.

Instead, I got one of these...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G9X5N18/ref=oh_details_o02_s01_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

and two of these...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008JJLW4M/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I use SyncBack Free to do backups. Initially it took hours, but when I do it every couple of days, it takes just a few minutes. I have it setup as RAID 1 (I think), so that one drive is a mirror of the other. I can access the files from any computer in the house - even my iPad - through my network. I haven't tried it from outside the house via the Internet, but that should also work.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

jdubu wrote:

I use Synology nas drives. I have found them to be... (show quote)

:thumbup:

tomw

jmizera wrote:

Well no. Basically, the device is a very small computer with a standard SATA hard drive inside. The computer portion died, so I extracted the drive. I tried multiple methods to recover the data, and all failed.

Remote access relies on the inbuilt computer contacting via the WD servers. The data is only stored on the physical drive.

Frankly, I would prefer actual cloud storage such as Google, Amazon, or Dropbox if its in your budget.

It sounds like you are pretty sophisticated about this stuff. One possible additional consideration - is it possible the drive you removed is not formatted in a standard way?

I use an NSA320 for backup, and I understand from the manual that standard drives formatted by this system can't be read directly by Windows if removed.

BatManPete Loc: Way Up North!

Google Drive and Cloud work very well. Whether I'm in Iron Mountain Mi or www.zihuatanejo.net/beaches.html‎ in Mexico
repairing Linotype machine. Then to Cancun MX to repair another one. I store copies of info. for repairing/adjusting simple adjustments on machine. Text files take up much less space than .jpg and videos do. However 1 picture is worth 10,000 words.

StuartNaylor

I have been using a WD "mycloud" drive for 6 months and it has worked well. From my PC any data added to my PC hard drive is immediately backed up. Gives my a great sense of security. One thing to remember is that having all your data in one location "ie the same building " is still risky.
My next step is to create a "VPN" between my home and office and mirror 2 mycloud drives across the VPN. In answer to your question about accessing your pics from your house with the drive at your sisters the answer is YES. I just came back from a trip to see my family in England and was able to show pictures stored on my "mycloud" drive at my home in Nashville on my iPad. My sister is able to upload any type of data to my "mycloud" from England and view any data on my "mycloud" from her Mac and iPad. Your only concern would be band width. The speed of any connection to the drive would be limited by the slowest internet connection at either end.

diensthunds

jmizera wrote:

I actually recommended one of these to a friend a couple of years ago. It failed recently, and would not boot. I was hopeful that the data could be recovered, and removed the drive. I knew it was a Linux formatted disk, but was unable to mount it.

Tried several recovery tools, no good. Looks like the backups were lost completely.

Were you using Microsoft Windows to accesses the disk? If you were and did not have a kernels module that allowed access to an ext4 or similarly formatted file system then you won't be able to read it. Did you try booting a machine with a live Linux Distrobution cd / dvd and plug the drive in and read it that way? There are very few disk that have been corrupted beyond the point where you can't pull the backups off of them when it comes to Linux.