Ah, someone who talks sense; that’s exactly the approach I’ve suggested a number of times in the past…
I’ve concluded that the manual was cobbled together from at least two parts; one written by the automated setup team, one written by the Dashboard team. The former is very bad. The latter isn’t so bad. But both seem to be written by the development teams, so they ‘know too much’, and forget that their target audience know nothing about the device, and may not know much about computers or networking. Breaking Rule #1 of writing consumer technical manuals.
https://community.wd.com/t/improve-the-user-manual/97202
This does remind me that I find the User Manual to be rather shambolic, in that it doesn’t make it clear that WD offer a plethora of methods to setup, access and maintain the MyCloud, not to mention photo apps, etc.
If all you want is local access, then I think everything can be done via the HTML Dashboard.
If you blindly followed all the steps in the manual, you’d end up installing a whole lot of unnecessary software. For instance, installing the remote access s/w is covered quite early on, …
It strikes me that the automated ‘all at once’ WD Setup program pushed in the User Manual:
i) is unecessary, since everything can be done via the Dashboard
ii) is too ‘black box’, so users don’t understand what it’s doing, and can’t fix it if it goes wrong
iii) installs too much unecessary software
iv) enables too many services that totally overload the NAS when it gets dumped with a huge amount of data (as it likely to happen with a new NAS)
v) prevents the user learning in a step-by-step …
During my setup of MyCloud 4T, it wants you to download a quick start program and have you map a drive. My question: Is it neccesary to install
No, it is totally unnecessary. All the facilities of the MyCloud can be configured using the Dashboard.
WD don’t make this very clear, but see p21 “Getting Started Without the Online Setup Installer”
This refers you to p41 of the User Manual onwards: “At a Glance: The Dashboard”.
It has recently dawned on me that the User Manual was probably writt…
I feel your pain…
This is a community of WD customers, who try to help each other out, and ease the pain. I’m not sure if there are any WD employees on this forum; if there are, they keep very quiet… Basically, it’s a way of doing support on the cheap, by getting your customers to feel part of a ‘community’, helping each other out; that’s what real communities do. IMHO, this is a cynical, money-saving exploitation of goodwill.
I think the User Manual is a shambles, as it is poorly structure…
And finally…
It appears that WD have quietly updated the MyCloud User Manual, to reflect the OS3 changes.
I report this mostly so that the unpaid support staff will know not to refer to old page numbers.
In my job, I write quite a few technical reports, and they go through a formal review process, with the multiple reviewers, prior to internal release.
If I submitted something as poorly written, contradictory and confusing as this new manual, even for review, I’d be ashamed of myself, and would expected …
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