Remote Backup with Dynamic IP Address

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud Mirror
1

Hi WD Community,

The essence of this question is: Is it possible, and how is it done, to setup recurring remote backups across the internet when the destination drive is on a network that is issued a dynamic IP Address?

More detail:

We have 2 WD MyCloud Mirror devices.  One is attached to our home network router and is our primary storage device for the home.  The other is at my parents house attached to their network’s router.  We both are on ADSL2+ connetions and our ISP’s issue our networks Dynamic IP Addresses.

I have successfully setup recurring remote backup’s between the devices, but during setup, I have to manually type in the current IP address of the destination drive’s router - otherwise it defaults to the IP Address of MyCloud device in the network instead of the router’s address and that won’t work.

The backup’s work great until the ISP for the destination drive network issues a new IP address to that router.  Then the backup’s fail and I have to create a new one which defeats the whole purpose of the recurring backup.  We can pay extra for static IP addresses from our ISP’s but I’d prefer not to if there is a way around this.

What I’m thinking is that since I can access the drives remotely through the apps regardless of the changing IP Address, there must be a way for the backup functionality to locate the drive regardless of the dynamic IP address also.

If any know’s how to set this up, I’d love to know. I’m certainly no tech-head - so advice in layman’s terms or step-by-step instructions would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

2

I would recommend looking at a dynamic DNS service like No-IP or DynDNS (or many others, just Google Dynamic DNS for other providers). Many of them have free account options, which will assign you a url (mychoseaddress.noip.com or suchlike) which they then resolve into the dynamic public numerical address of your router. Hence as that public address is changed periodically by your ISP or whatever the link updates and you can always access your router/network via the fixed url.

It works by having a daemon running somewhere on your network which periodically contacts the No-IP servers and confirms your current address. Indeed many routers these days have such functionality built-in, and many router makers have deals with the DDNS providers to ease the deal. For example my Netgear router gives me a free No-IP account which I don’t have to reconfirm every 30 days (as you do on the regular free accounts).

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Hi Darren,

Thanks for your advice mate.  Looks like I’ll have to use DynDNS as it is supported by the destination router (as well as ours).

Cheers!

4

Maybe you can expand on how you got this to work? I am looking to do the same thing with remote to friend’s mycloud