i am just about to get a My Cloud drive but have never used such a device.
can i install this in one office and access it via the other on the fly?
is My Cloud reliable there seems by reading the forum lots and lots of problems with this or am i looking at the wrong product range, needs to be bullet proof can’t be dealing with problems can anyone advise?
I suggest you use the following links to read about WD My Cloud and other WD devices.
The MyCloud series devices are what are known as “Network Attached Storage”, or NAS devices. They are basically mini fileservers. They host a network reachable file system that various kinds of OSes are able to view and make use of.
On windows, this is accomplished using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. That is needlessly verbose, but is what the protocol used for file and printer sharing on windows is called. The MyCloud uses a FOSS (Free Open Source Software) server program called SAMBA to provide the needed functionality, so that windows machines can see the MyCloud as if it were a shared/networked folder, as are commonly used in corporate environments. Samba works pretty well, but is not without a few warts here and there. For the most part, it works exactly like a windows file server.
Linux and OSX use a different protocol, called NFS. (Network File System.) NFS is vastly older than SMB, and is a throwback to the glory days of big UNIX mainframes. It was a way for small mini-computers to connect with the “mass storage” available on the local mainframe, without the need to have large storage devices in those small workstations. The MyCloud series devices speak this languge natively, and need only a modern implementation of the service baked into the device’s kernel, which the MyCloud devices offer.
Both of those technologies predate the emergence of the internet as a contemporary staple of modern living though, and are geared toward local area networks (Like the network that is JUST inside your house), rather than wide area networks (Like the internet.) As such, these protocols make assumptions about how devices can effectively communicate that arent sensible when trying to be reached across a wide public link, like across the internet. They are not nearly secure enough, for one thing-- Attackers abound on the internet, and these protocols, with their assumptions about trusted local users, just are not good fits.
Most of the problems that will be encountered with the MyCloud series devices will come about from people trying to “mount” (or “map”) the storage the device offers, while trying to reach it across the public internet. The device really is not meant for this. There ARE ways to make it work, but none of them are really something I would suggest,-- the most sensible of which is to set up a tunnel to your local network using a VPN. (Virtual Private Network.)
NAS appliance are VERY useful for a number of home user situations however. A major one, in this age of cord cutting, is to use it to store a large movie/music archive, that can be reached using a home media appliance, like a Roku, or an AppleTV, or even a smart TV. These media center appliances will always be local to your home network (you arent going to try to lug your TV with you are you?), and can connect with this central storage device, and play content stored on it with very little difficulty. This allows a single NAS appliance to serve a local media library to many rooms in the house at once.
Other use cases include wanting to have a central backup location, or central data storage location for frequently accessed files. The NAS’s storage can be mapped by local computers, and used in exactly this way. (Basically, imagine a “virtual” USB stick that every computer in your house can all use AT THE SAME TIME. The caveat, is that it only works inside your house.) This allows the NAS to be a common point from which many computers or other digital devices can get files from easily.
The last commonly used deployment case, is as a centralized, trusted backup device. This is where the MyCloud’s TimeMachine backup functionality comes in handy, as well as its built in rsync daemon, and pals.
There is significant confusion in the name WD chose to give these devices. Specifically “Cloud”.
In the storage industry, “The Cloud” is synonymous with “Across the internet.” Again, these devices are actually just NAS appliances. They are not really tailored to be connected to across the internet as their primary use case. Western Digital, in their infinite wisdom (ahem.) created a software ecosystem to help bridge that function gap, which is what MyCloud.com and pals bring to the mix. The MyCloud devices are able to be registered with the internet service provided by WD, so that by connecting to WD’s servers, a secure communication channel through your network, and to the MyCloud can be established, and files can be saved or stored on the device from anywhere with internet connectivity. This is how the device offers “Cloud services.” In reality, this software ecosystem has lots of bugs, gotchas, caveats, and other less than pretty things to say about it.
If you purchase this device as a NAS appliance, it will meet your needs with little headache.
If you purchase this device to try and use it for “Personal cloud services” (eg, storage you can reach any time, anywhere, over the internet) you will likely come to be disappointed, due to the software ecosystem needed.
Weather or not you will be satisfied with the product depends on that distinction.
thanks for advice guys looks like VPN is what i need to setup
Really an excellent write up on how the WD My Cloud series serves the most typical use cases. Thanks very much!!!
It seems that the MyClouds don’t satisfy the O.P.s main requirement (“needs to be bullet proof can’t be dealing with problems”).
Can the O.P. hope to get this level of reliability in any end-user targeted NAS product? ; out of the box, without resorting the Fox_Exe et.al. hacks, and be able to access video files across the N.A. continent?. (We’ll leave across an ocean for another day 
> Lets also assume that the O.P.'s NAS lives in a city that has Google Fiber, which of course is still likely just the first leg of network path.
Thanks for your thoughts, but I also understand time is not infinite
nnnn_mm
**Full Disclosure, Used to work for NetApp, providing support for their FAS series appliances.
Even with a huge power-eating, air conditioned server-room-requiring giant enterprise grade hunk of storage-- they are going to find the same problems. SAN devices, by their nature, are going to require a specialized pipe (Typically fibrechannel), and to be efficiently reached over the public internet are going to need a dedicated VPN with link aggregated enpoints. The exact same protocols are going to be used (NetApp actually licenses the exact same code that MS uses in their windows server lineup, so unlike this consumer box, does not use SAMBA-- but it is STILL SMB protocol), such as SMB and NFS, just that in addition to that there are several proprietary ones, like SnapMirror and pals, special interfaces for inter-device clustering for graceful failovers, et al.
There is no magic bullet here. The enterprise grade appliances have some interesting features that work at the block level (instead of FS level), making them useful for things like iSCSI LUNs and the like that most end users would never even dream of using, or for aggregating disk arrays into virtual volumes and the like-- but otherwise, the actual nitty gritty of REACHING the storage is going to be over the exact same protocols, and is going to have the exact same use case restrictions and caveats. They tend to have better management software than these MyCloud devices, but if you get friendly with the ssh enabled console, the manual administration is remarkably similar for most tasks.
To be an effective cloud solution, you will need to do what enterprise cloud providers do: Redundant and aggregated pipes to the internet (with good peering arrangements), dedicated switch hardware behind that, with mass storage backed by redundant copies done transparently with transparent failover modes, with hot spares in the array.
That precludes the convenience of a single device, low cost solution like the MyCloud.
One can host their own VPN tunnel, over a good consumer internet pipe (like domestic fiber, if you are fortunate enough to have it), but without the peering arrangements, the traffic will be subject to throttling and other QoS related headaches imposed by the ISP-- as well, the issue of having only the single link, meaning that if the interface goes down for some reason, the storage will stop being accessible. Additionally, the lack of failover modes means that if the hosting device itself has a problem (Maybe your cat knocks it off the shelf while you are out? etc.) there are no additional mirrored clone devices to be automatically promoted to continue to serve the cloud storage, meaning the storage is down.
Basically, the 99.9999% availability guarantees provided by big cloud storage firms comes from having massively parallelized and redundant hardware at all levels that can seamlessly provide services for downed nodes. That paralellization is not something you should ever expect from a home user appliance, ever.
(For reference, a typical FAS series NetApp appliance uses redundantly cabled disk trays that use either SAS or Fibrechannel as the communication medium with the head unit, so that if the linkage chain gets damaged, a redundant path to the disks in the tray array is present, and the storage will not go down. After that, the head unit has about 5 to 10 (depending on model) gigabit ethernet ports (and PCIe slots to house additional Gigabit or fibrechannel interfaces) that can be aggregated in at least 5 different configurations for either speed or fault tolerance. They come stock with 2 fibrechannel/fiber optic interconnects for connecting to another FAS head unit of the same make and model, to function as seamless failover redundancy of the actual head unit in the event of a system failure, and should be configured on a local switched fabric with redundant paths to the head units. Each head unit also has redundant PSUs, and should be powered from redundant power rails on redundant breakers. At the RAID level, FAS series appliances use a modified version of RAID4, with double parity stripes. This means a minimum of 5 disks are required in an array, any number of arrays can be in an aggregate, and virtual volumes are hosted on such aggregates. The recommended setup is for at least 1 spare disk for each array to serve as a hot spare. The system automatically does raid scrubs to test for failing disks, and will fail a disk in the array on encountering even a single failed sector. It will the then promote the hot spare, rebuild the array automatically, and continue to serve data in single-degraded mode until the new drive is rebuilt from the remaining data and parity stripes. In comparison, a WDMyCloud (single bay) has a single gigabit ethernet port, a single sata drive in the enclosure, and a single USB3 interface on the back. One of those things is NOT like the other. 
And that is the SIMPLE enterprise solution!! You should see what the clustermode OntapOS8 based solutions do! YEOWZA)
There is no “easy” solution, even for Cloud Service providers. All that stuff on the Netapp FAS series device? Needs you to know what you are doing, needs you to set it up CORRECTLY at your site, needs you to monitor it and administer it as a full time job, and needs you to plan for, and supply upgrades and replacements as required.
Basically, asking for “An easy to use, consumer level device that never fails, and never poses a single headache” is like asking for a pet unicorn. Not gonna happen. Understanding the technology, understanding that cloud storage is not magical, and understanding that you have to work for what you get, are how you make a fair compromise with yourself on your remote storage needs. “Resetting expectations” was a major job skill working for NetApp support, as the “It’s MAGIC!!” viewpoint of many executives and middle managers was so endemic, that it needed constant addressing. Reality is sadly full of gotchas, caveats, and less than nice things.
Again, thanks for some fantastic detail.
It is as I suspected, even in enterprise level systems, there are so many pieces and requirements for hardware and human resources that getting to 99.999 percent reliability is an engineering project, not an off-the-shelf purchase.
Thanks and good night!
nnnn_mm
Hi,
Lots of informative info here, but not exactly answering your original question, so here is my take on this. I will dissect your original question:
Does My Cloud work the same way as a attached HDD…
In part, yes, in that the user can access files on a My Cloud (i.e. NAS device) like they can from an attached HDD, In addition, it can be accessed from more than one computer at a time by multiple users, because it is connected to the home network router, not a single PC.
.
… but over the internet
To make clear, the above example is NOT done “over the internet” It is within the same home network, but if you used a different network; e.g. your next door neighbor’s home network or one hundreds of miles away to contact the My Cloud, THAT would be considered connecting “over the Internet.” An important distinction. So, in a sense your answer is yes, under these conditions. To sum this up, you need to use the internet if you are on different networks, but within your own environment you only use the local (home) network.
Now, you mention accessing data from one office to another. Is it in the same home, business, or elsewhere? Same conditions above apply. Whether you use home network only or also other networks plus internet, a NAS will fill the bill.
What to get depends on the size of your business and how many people will be accessing the NAS, and how often they do. A basic My Cloud is really for individual light use. If one has more people and computers to access the NAS and more info and backups to make, a more robust My Cloud is needed. They will be found at WD main site under Network Attached Storage section (not the (personal/home) My Cloud section of products. My guess is you need to figure your exact use/needs and figure this out first, so go here to see the products and info in the NAS section of more robust products. Look here: All Network Attached Storage: Shop NAS Enclosures & Drives | Western Digital
BTW, I have one of the robust My Clouds and use it as a basic media server for music and video. I access it from both home and away by using the WD My Cloud app to listen to music and watch videos and also do this miles from home when I travel…
ALL data on my device is COPIES of data I have stored elsewhere, so I make no backups of my My Cloud, as it IS my backup. Your needs will be different, for sure.
Good luck searching your options.
Thanks in advance to those who reply.
My plan is to use my WD My Cloud 6TB In a LAN-only environment, with no internet access.
I don’t really care about the Cloud features or accessing the drive from a mobile device, but I do want to allow two Mac computers connected to the same switch to be able to use it for backup. I expect that this is possible, but my concern is that setup instructions for this scenario are not going to be explicitly available, and internet configuration is going to be assumed throughout the documentation. Does anyone have advice on how to set this up with no internet connectivity?
The instructions for using TimeMachine do not mention internet connectivity anywhere.
If you are using multiple devices, please use the ‘registered user’ method, instead of the ‘guest’ method, that way the MyCloud will keep the backups separate.
I dont own any OSX hosts, so cannot really help you more than this.
[quote=“SamF, post:9, topic:205055, full:true”]Does anyone have advice on how to set this up with no internet connectivity?
[/quote]
Just connect the My Cloud to the local network router. You may have to use the My Dashboard to configure the time/date on the My Cloud however. If you do not have a local network router then you could configure the My Cloud with a static IP address and use a network switch instead.
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