First Impressions - My Book Live Duo

I have been researching external hard drives for a month and found it very difficult to get good information. I became aware of the RAID 1 idea of having another copy of your info during my research which makes a lot of sense considering that the main goal is to not loose your data. In looking at many manufacturer websites it was very confusing what the drives would really do and some sales people advised the need to play with port settings if I wanted to access my data remotely.

I saw the WD news release early January and product detail and this was exactly what I was looking for in layman’s terms. I received the device four days ago and without reading much info, I had the plug and play device up and running in an hour. It was so easy I thought I might have missed a step and ready through the 150 or so page manual and really did not learn much, the device is very user friendly to set up.

I have a Windows 7 computer and an XP computer, iphone and ipad as well as a work computer.  

The back -up works perfect. It took time to do the initial back-up but this is something you can plan late in the evening.  I did get an error code (1637)  when installing on the XP but downloaded the software from the WD site and it worked fine.   I called the help desk when I got this error and they were friendly, located in the Dominican Republic. The call got dropped when I was being passed to the second line support and while I was on hold the second time, I found the software on WD’s site.  The unit comes with a telephone number that helps you set it up if you do run into any problems.

When I found this product on the WD website, I thought I would need to wait a month or more to get it in Canada. It was not available at Futureshop, Best Buy or Canada Computers but I did find it at costco.ca for $369. They are already sold out when I checked today as I already recommended it to two friends.

I downloaded the three iphone apps and they seem to work well. There are some things I am working through such as

  1. I can not see all my picture folders with WD photos but can see them with WD 2go  

  2. There seemed to be some excels that are not opening

  3. Music seemed to pause through my iphone even when I was on my own network. 

  4. I still need to try streaming movies

I was very pleased today to be able to access the files I had stored on my central network through the web. I could open them and work on them from another computer. 

I will work out some of the minor issues I had above and let you know if I can not resolve them. 

I think WD did a great job explaining the capability of this product, making it user friendly, addressing the needs of the average home user, supporting the set-up through thier offering of help. There is no other manufacturer that has done this at least as far as I can tell by reviewing websites many times trying to make a decision. 

The My Book Live Duo is a great product, so far no issues with it.  In reference of WD Photos please try putting all pictures in the Shared Pictures folder.

They are in my shared Pictures. I just checked again and they all came in. It could have just been a timing issue of when I transferred them and when I tried the app. All is good. 

There is a delay between when you put the pictures in your Shared Pictures directory and when you see them in WD Photos because we transcode (create smaller size images) the photos to be able to serve them up faster through the App. This takes time to crawl through your Photos (especially if you have quite a few photos).

Glad you like the Duo!

Tony

Does the folder have to remain named “Shared Pictures” in order to work properly?  Or would it still work if I renamed this to just “Pictures” but kept it under the “Public” folder?

Yes it does. The WD Photos Application relies on this folder structure.

You could create your own set of folders if you are not interested in using the Apps.