I just installed my WD My Cloud yesterday. In reading through the users manual I find its use as a backup drive intriguing. I’m currently using a separate Seagate 2 TB USB drive and Windows BU/Restore. I don’t particularly like the Win program because it runs out of space every few months without warning and requires me to manually delete the oldest backups. It also seems to take up a lot of storage (I do video editing and have a lot of archived video files).
My questions are:
Can Smartware back up files from multiple drives? My SSD boot drive is important but most of my data is on a 2 TB second internal drive. BU/Restore backs up files that I select from both.
What are the advantages of tethering my backup drive to the WD My Cloud? Why not simply keep it as a dedicated external drive?
You can read the SmartWare User Manual and see what you thank about it.
Connecting your Seagate to the USB on your new My Cloud would mean you still have that two TB of storage plus whatever size your My Cloud is. Example two TB + two TB= four. You should have seen that in the WD My Cloud User Manual, Connecting a USB Hard Drive.
Depending on which version of Windows one is using Windows Backup/Restore may not support backing up to NAS drives like the My Cloud.
Can Smartware back up files from multiple drives? My SSD boot drive is important but most of my data is on a 2 TB second internal drive. BU/Restore backs up files that I select from both.
Yes one can change the settings within the Smartware program to backup data contained on a USB hard drive attached to that computer (or possibly even a mapped drive on that computer). There are several third party backup programs that offer more features than Smartware that will backup any drive connected to a computer.
What are the advantages of tethering my backup drive to the WD My Cloud? Why not simply keep it as a dedicated external drive?
The main advantage of attaching a USB hard drive to the My Cloud is two fold. One is to increase the storage space of the My Cloud. The USB hard drive when attached to the My Cloud is seen as another “Share”. Second, that attached USB drive can be used as a backup location for the My Cloud to backup the My Cloud contents using Safepoint / Backup. See the My Cloud User Manual for more information on using Safepoint / Backup to backup the My Cloud data.
