Before my rant, I truly wish to thank all the participants here for their endless patience and energy spent to respond to all the questions.
I purchased 3 WD My Clouds; 2 for my home office and 1 for an off-site location (my cabin). I apparently did not do enough research before I bought as I was unaware that you are able to map a remote drive to a local drive letter. I am better than your average bear at tech stuff, but I have no idea what you are talking about with SSH and hacking the firmware. I expected I would be able to accomplish the most simple of tasks, mapping a remote drive, with the WD supplied software. As I have come to learn over the last 6 months, this is not possible (but was possible with earlier firmware/software). I cannot fathom a reason why this was removed. To be truthful, I even had a fair amount of pain setting up shares and I did search/read this forum as well as the user manual–it is just not that intuitive.
So without a reasonably easy solution; my MyClouds are heading for eBay listings.
Seagate’s Personal Cloud, if you can even use that word here, seems to include the capability of mapping a remote NAS to a local drive letter–so I am now going down that path to see if I can find my desired solution.
Last time I looked into the Seagate NAS it did NOT run at gigabit speed and used USB2. not USB3. Both “features” are absolutely necessary, so I hope by now they fixed those oversights.
Oh, and the user forum? Seagate dumped that quite a few years ago. Good luck with minimal support from them.
Why not Synology? Because I was looking for a lower cost solution. I have two locations that I’m at often. I’m currently using OneDrive, but rapidly running out of space. I guess I need to go back and look at the cost/benefit comparison of an online cloud service versus hosting my own. Perhaps I was/am naive on the level of investment required.
I read and viewed articles and videos on the MyCloud and thought it would be the perfect solution. However, not much highly visible stuff on the lack of remote access until you start trying to set it up.
Also, perhaps I have “hit the wall” on my technical competence.
Yeah, if you read early reviews, or WD press releases, you would think it supported remote mapping. And it did.
But then WD removed that capability in an ‘upgrade’, without any explanation of why they had done it. No explanation has been forthcoming in the 18 months since the ‘upgrade’.
I couldn’t care less what the OP does, having no affiliation to WD. But they might search these forums for ‘Seagate’, since I recall less than complimentary comments. Whereas I’ve only read good things about QNAP.
When these things hit the market quite a few years ago, I was interested, and I read reviews that they are not gigabit nor use USB3. The review may have been at Storage Review, but can’t remember. And when I saw the spec sheet that said nothing other than “Ethernet” but not the speed, PLUS how many are on a pallet (This is a spec???), I said to myself t,he heck with it and waited for the WDs to arrive.
In many ways, Seagate “lost it” about the time they discontinued their user forum. They are a shadow of their former self today!
It should be noted that if you have an older first gen v4.x single bay My Cloud it is possible to install an unofficial app that will allow for remote mapping. This app isn’t supported on the second gen v2.x single bay My Cloud.
Thank you for your comment. I will need to do some research to find out what gen each of the 3 myclouds are–not betting all three will be Gen 1 though.
Took me less than 15 minutes to unbox, connect, and setup with remote access using file explorer on three different computers. Used all Seagate software and setup including Sdrive and BoxSync. No SSH, firmware hacks, or other modifications necessary.
I am satisfied with the implementation and will be purchasing another for remote site backup of the first.
One thing is that the shares are user based; not folder based. Therefore you cannot assign individual users to specific folders–they each get their own private folder. IF you want to share folders among users, you must do it under the “public” folder. Not what I was expecting, but this does not affect my usage scenario.
I suspect my not willing to spend $$$$s on something bigger better in the WD or Synology line may be the root of my problems.
Update: The Seaget Personal Cloud is working splendidly for my purposes. Their application Sdrive allows me to map the NAS in the remote access scenario without any problems. It does prompt for credentials at every boot, but you can have the logon popup remembers these so just a one click confirm. Speed is acceptable but not as fast as OneDrive and dependent on internet connection capacity.
The Personal Cloud does generate some noise and have seen other reviewers mention the same. Just some quiet whirrs when it apparently wakes up from power save mode. Not really annoying to me.
Meanwhile on my two MyClouds, both continue to randomly report a couple times per week network link lost, system restart, and system restore successful messages—not very comforting. Have not lost any data that I am aware of. One MyCloud blue LED status indicator light has failed.
Future plan is to acquire another Personal Could device for alternate site backup.
I am happy with this solution. No Seagete forum for support, but I haven’t needed support at all. Everything is very intuitive.
You guys provide a tremendous service here for users, but the shear volume of reported problems and how to do’s is scary.
Hi Martin - Regarding your post about the Seagate Personal Cloud. If you did any file transferring, I was wondering about the reliability.
I recently purchased a 4T My Cloud Home, upgrading from my 2T My Cloud. However, no matter which method (aside from setting up an FTP which I saw in one Youtube video) I’ve used, inevitably whole folders, subfolders and their contents don’t make it over to the new My Cloud Home.
I thought what I needed – just a new external with remote access – and the process to get there – setting it up and transferring files over – would be rather simple, straightforward and not very time consuming. But I’ve spend hours upon hours waiting on the files to transfer then going through the original My Cloud to make sure the entire transfer worked, then one by one transferring over the files and folders that didn’t make it.
I’m ready to call it a loss and go get a Seagate if this process will take less time than going back through 2T of my old files to make sure they got transferred.
