I’m looking to have my documents centralized on the my cloud hard drive. I would like my OSs to point to this directory to access documents whether it be on my laptop or desktop. The problem is is that I seem to have to continually reconnect every time I reboot my computer to access this directory. I guess what I’d like to see is to have every folder in the documents folder of my operating system be an alias to the WD my cloud folders that are on the WD drive. Is this possible without having to manually connect to the iCloud Drive every time the computer reboots?
You have to first connect to the share using Finder, Go, Connect to server. Use the smb://YourCloud/MyDocuments format, instead of the afp:\… protocol.
Enter your credentials and save them in your keychain.
Then go to System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items drag and rop the mounted share in the window, and check the box to have the system reconnect at login.
Ditto what Etupes says; you need to have your shares mounted, and adding them to the login items will make that automatic with every login (as long as you on your home network and not trying to use them remotely).
But I’m curious: why smb:// rather than afp://? I’ve tried both, and to be honest I can’t see any consistent speed advantage of one over the other (one day one seems faster, another day the other). The My Cloud comes with the netatalk package (v3.0, I think) installed, and although OS X has supposedly switched to Samba, AFP connections seem to work just fine for me.
What I’d really like to do is upgrade to netatalk to v3.1, which as I understand it should make it easy for Spotlight to index my shares. I think I tried using “apt-get install,” but that actually *downgraded* netatalk to version 2 something! So I ended up doing a system restore on the My Cloud to get back to 3.0 and decided to leave well enough alone.
First, if you’ve got any shares already mounted, unmount them (select them all and just hit ⌘-E or drag the disk icons to the Trash).
Then (still in the Finder), hit ⌘-K and enter:
smb://AJsCloud.local
What happens? Still nothing? It should display a list of available shares to mount. Pick multiple ones (if more than one) by ⌘-clicking. If they’re not public you’ll be prompted for your My Cloud username/password, which you can have saved in the Keychain to avoid the hassle in the future. If that doesn’t work, I’m not sure what to say, but than again I’m not convinced your’e missing out on anything by using AFP.
EDIT: By the way, “afp://AJsCloud._afpovertcp._tcp.local” represents the My Cloud server, not any of your shares. If you had a share called “LotsaStuff,” mounted it, then did a Get Info on it, you see it as:
afp://AJsCloud._afpovertcp._tcp.local/LotsaStuff
You’ve got to mount the specific shares you want by using ⌘-K and either afp://AJsCloud.local or smb://AJsCloud.local. (Or if you just want to mount that one LotsaStuff share, you could enter afp://AJsCloud.local/LotsaStuff.)
AJcsCloud is always shown in the “shared” section, and guest is mounted, but i cannot disconnect Guest. I can hit “Connect As,” and my password is saved in the keychain and I can hit ok, and it logs into my account which has public and the Brutico Share. When I put smb://AJsCloud.local, it prompts me for a user and pass. Putting in the same password makes it try to connect, and then fails.
Made a few more comments above, but try this. When you click on AJsCloud there in the Finder sidebar, a column or list should appear right next to it with all the available shares on your My Cloud. If you’ve mounted any as “Guest” I’d try just unmounting everything and starting over. You can either click the little eject icon next to each mounted share or take a short cut and just click the eject icon there next to “AJsCloud” in the Finder sidebar (that will unmount all volumes at once).
Then, leave that AJsCloud in the sidebar alone. Ignore it and try mounting your shares using ⌘-K (same as the “Go > Go to folder…” menu item) and entering “smb://AJsCloud.local”. If starting from scratch like that doesn’t do anything, then I guess you just keep using AFP… Can’t think of anything else.
Just got it to work - however the login is mych slower than afp. Is SMB better? Also - can i make it log in silently at startup? I hate seeing that wondow pop up.
Just got it to work - however the login is mych slower than afp. Is SMB better? Also - can i make it log in silently at startup? I hate seeing that wondow pop up.
I don’t really know if it’s “better” or not–I’m not an expert on that kind of stuff. All I know is that sometimes transfer speeds are faster if I mount disks using smb:// and other times it seems a bit faster if I use afp://… With Mavericks I guess Apple began shifting away from AFP to using SMB. But the fact of the matter is that OS X supports both, and so does the My Cloud. The My Cloud software component (called netatalk) that enables shares to be mounted via AFP maintains databases that index where stuff is on each share. (For the curious, they’re stored in /var/netatalk/CNID, where there’s a directory for each share containing an invisible “.AppleDB” file, which is the database.) My take from the netatalk documentation is that if you access your shares in other ways (like SMB or using SSH) and move and delete a bunch of stuff, it makes it difficult for those AFP indexes (so to speak) to stay accurate, because the only changes that they register are ones made when the shares are mounted using AFP… netatalk tries to accommodate that as best it can though. I’m pretty sure you’d never “lose” anything–I’d been switching back and forth between AFP and SMB for months before I found that out and never lost anything–it’s just that those databases that netatalk uses can become corrupt (they’re not hard to rebuild if they do), which I suppose would slow things down. All of which is to say that if you use AFP, it’s probably best to stick with AFP.
Again, though, all this is just my total layman’s mental picture of what’s going on. I tried to prompt Etupes earlier to explain why exactly he was directing you to use SMB in lieu of AFP. Yes, Apple has started moving in the direction of SMB, but accessing networked storage is still 100% supported and functional in OS X, and the My Cloud has always worked just fine with it for me.
Yes, you can get shares to mount automatically whenever you log in, as Etupes explained above. My recommendation would be to first pick a protocol–if AFP works for you, then go with AFP. Then do this:
Mount the shares that you want see mounted at login/startup, using ⌘-K and “afp://…” (or "smb://…, if that’s the protocol you like).
Open System Preferences.
Click on the Users & Groups preference pane.
Make sure your username is selected on the left, then click on the “Login Items” tab.
Now move that Users & Groups preferences window off to the side a little if you need to so that you can see the icons for all the shares you want automounted there on the desktop.
Click on the Desktop, then select those shares and drag-and-drop them right there on top of the list of those other Login Items in the Users & Groups pref. pane. When you drop the share icons on to that list, you’ll see that they get added to the bottom of it.
Now every time you log in those shares will get mounted automatically. It’s been my experience that if you used AFP back in step (1), then they’ll mount with AFP, and if you used SMB, then they’ll mount with SMB. The computer I guess remembers that somehow.
Be aware though that this only works when you’re on your own network. If you’re doing this on a MacBook, every time you log in but happen to be on some other network, the Finder will still try to mount those shares–and fail. That can be kind of a pain in itself, depending on how much you move around, because then you have to dismiss dialog boxes announcing how the shares can’t be mounted. And obviously you can’t expect to access any of your documents on those shares if they can’t mount. Also keep in mind that working with documents on the My Cloud is going to feel quite a bit slower than if they’re on your computer’s hard drive. Especially if you’re plugging into your network over Wi-Fi instead of with an Ethernet cable (a lot of people don’t realize just how much slower most Wi-Fi is than Ethernet, which is in turn slower than a regular old local hard disk). But it all depends on what kind of documents you’re working with. Using files for writing like Pages documents or text files could work just fine. Complex databases (like iPhoto libraries) that are always reading/writing lots of stuff to the drive are tough to work with on a network drive. They’re really slow and more at risk of getting corrupted, esp. if you’re networked using Wi-Fi. It all depends on what you’re working with, but keeping your Documents folder on the My Cloud may not turn out to work as slick as you’d think.
I appreciate your time and efforts. The main reason I was getting MyCloud, was as a cheaper Dropbox substitution. I wanted my entire document folder in the cloud. I wanted to access it via laptop, desktop and mobile devices, so that my files can indeed be anywhere.
I was excited about Apple’s iCloud Drive, but unfortunately theres not a plain document viewer in the AppStore, so i cannot browse files at all. I have to open an app, and then open a file and browse in that way. That was a huge disappointment for me. Plus opening a document in iPad in pages or Numbers and saving it re-writes the document to another place. Strange thought process.
Microsoft Office for ipad only allows you to save to their One Drive service. The wierdness continues.
I am assuming the price of cloud storage will decrease over the coming months, but 120.00 a year for 1TB of storage is steep.
The current plan of with regards to Apple’s ecosystem and the way HDDs are set up is very abnormal.
Will probably take this back. Thanks for the help.
No problem. Actually if what you’re looking for is access-from-anywhere to you documents, the “WD My Cloud” app works. And the iOS version I think is actually really good. They might well do the trick just fine for you.
What’s difficult is getting your shares to appear mounted on the Desktop just like any other drive. As you found out, it’s fairly easy when you’re on your own network. But accessing your My Cloud remotely in a way that puts drive icons on your desktop that work just like other drive icons is a seriouos pain in the keester on Macs. WD’s framework for doing this is through the wdmycloud.com website (a.k.a. wd2go.com). I’ve managed to get it to work, but you have to install Java, and then you can only use Firefox (even though WD’s documentation says only Safari will work–not!), and then there’s all these warning dialog boxes that you have to ignore, and if you’re blocking Google Analytics it won’t work at all. It’s just a friggin’ mess. To get what I think you have in mind, you really would want to set up VPN on your home network, and that’s a whole other can of worms.
Having said that, the WD My Cloud app for OS X works reliably. It’s not a glossy, polished, Retina-optimized app… But it does work. As long as you’re on the Internet, you should be able to get to your files. But working with them will be a bit different than working with a drive icon on the Desktop. The iOS version, like I said before, is really cool. It looks good, and you can also use it to access your Dropbox and Google Drive folders–all in the same app. I like it. $120 a year for cloud storage is steep; don’t know what Apple will charge for iCloud Drive space once Yosemite is released, but they’re not going to give you 1TB for free, that’s for sure. I’d recommend taking the WD My Cloud apps for a spin before you bring it back to the store. The thing with Dropbox/iCloud Drive, etc. (besides privacy)–is that I think it’s a pretty darn safe bet your data’s not going to vanish all by itself. The My Cloud has a high-performance, high-quality drive inside, especially for that price. But if your data’s really important, you’ll also want have it backed up off-site, because if the My Cloud breaks or whatever you’re screwed. It’s taken me a while to get everything working the way I want, but I’ve been happy with it.
Netatalk is an OpenSource software package, that can be used to turn a *NIX machine into an extremely high-performance and reliable file server for Macintosh computers.
Using Netatalk’s AFP 3.3 compliant file-server leads to significantly higher transmission speeds compared with Macs accessing a server via SaMBa/NFS while providing clients with the best possible user experience (full support for Macintosh metadata, flawlessly supporting mixed environments of classic Mac OS and OS X clients)
So, to answer your question: No. SMB is not better when you’re using a My Cloud with a Mac. In fact, AFP is better.
Again, though to keep things optimized, I’d stick with AFP and not switch back-and-forth betwee protocols in order to keep the netatalk databases from getting corrupted. After months and months of switching back and forth, my databases had in fact become pretty messed up. I deleted and rebuilt them (you need to enable SSH and have a very modest amount of courage to work with the command line), and I am indeed seeing definitely improved performance.
Now if only WD would upgrade to netatalk 3.1 in the firmware, we’d have functional and reliable Spotlight support…
