Simple question re NAS device

My Cloud OS 5 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX Series
1

I am new to using NAS so please excuse my ignorance. I want to copy a directory on my My Cloud EX2 Ultra unit to another directory on the same unit. Is this transfer done internally to the NAS, i.e., no file traffic on the network? I would assume the answer is “yes,” but I would like to make sure from people in the know.

Thanks in advance,
Bill

2

This is an excellent question.

Your assumption is logical. . . but unfortunately the feature set is NOT logical.

  • If you initiate a file copy using a PC/MAC; the PC/MAC is doing the copying and you will have two way traffic across your network.

  • For some unfathomable reason, you cannot do this task using any WD apps.

  • If you SSH into the device and use a program like WinSCP; or execute command line linux commands. . .then the device copying can be made internal to the device.

3

Thank you very much for your reply. Hey, why should I be surprised that Windows wouldn’t allow the quicker transfer?

Bill

4

An Internal COPY type backup can be used to copy data from SHARE1 to SHARE2.
The only issue is the Internal Backup app with create a similar directory path on your SHARE2 in which will need to be modified if needed.

EXAMPLE: “Backups” the name of the Internal Backup job and the “date” is the dated folder of the backup occurrence.
/shares/SHARE2/Backups/2021-04-08-160001/Public/Shared Movies

So the Internal Backup job will COPY data from /shares/SHARE1/Public/Shared Movies to /shares/SHARE2/Backups/2021-04-08-160001/Public/Shared Movies

5

The issue is not “windows” slowing down the connection.

The issue is that NAS box is physically separate from the PC box. Communications will be limited by the network speed. (and Heaven help you if your PC is connected to the network via a wireless connection).

If there is a shortcoming . .the shortcoming is with WD for not providing an effective file management tool native to NAS box. In the past, to do mass copying before I learned how to SSH into the box, I had to resort to the rather limited “backup” function of the NAS to do the transfer.

6

Hey, why should I be surprised that Windows wouldn’t allow the quicker transfer?

This has nothing to do with Windows. Linux or MacOS or Android would be exactly the same. It is a network device and all the computer knows is that you want to copy data from one place to another. It doesn’t know that the place is the same device, nor does it speak in a language that the device understands to mean “tell the device to copy this itself”.

The same would happen if you did a “copy” on your local machine, for any OS. The OS reads in and writes out all the data.

If you simply “move” the file then it is fast, the same as it would be on your local machine.

What NAS_User said is correct. If you are working in the local OS that runs on the NAS via ssh then it can be fast without using the network, because you are working within the system itself.

If your NAS were running an expensive Windows OS then potentially it could use offloaded data transfer. But the NAS is using cheap commodity hardware and a cheap and very cut down operating system that lacks “high end” server features. WD are selling to a cost critical market, not a high end data center.

8

Not sure I am buying it. . . . .if I can do these tasks from an SSH command line, or get 90% of the functionality using WinSCP. . . . then I am sure that the developers can write an app for the WD Nas boxes to do file operations using a GUI. I thought (my memory fades) that we could do this on the OS3 web app. . . .where I could copy from share to share, even when the shares resided on different NAS boxes?

Very true.
Sometimes. . .you do get what you pay for.

Edit - Huh. . thinking about it. . . .I guess the second quote here kinda answers my query related to the first quote.