I’m using a WD My Passport Wireless Pro, and connecting to that via my iPhone with the My Cloud app. In particular, I’m trying to finish backing up my photo library (23GB) before I enable “Optimize storage on this iPhone” and lose the local full size originals.
To do this, I turn on the MPWP and open the app. I can view the files on the drive, etc. I open “Activity” and see that, in fact, my “Auto backup” task is chugging along (6GB of 8 remaining). After two minutes of inactivity, my screen locks automatically, killing the sync task, but my phone is still connected to the MPWP wifi network. When I unlock and then try to browse files on the drive, it claims it’s been disconnected. Of course, the “Auto backup” task has stalled. Force-quitting and reopening the app doesn’t fix it; the drive still won’t connect. Switching wifi networks, then switching back to the MPWP, then reopening My Cloud DOES restore the connection (no power cycle of the MPWP necessary).
That strikes me as a bug with either the app, the MPWP, or both.
Expected: 1) the app should resume connectivity after being interrupted by backgrounding or phone sleep without having to kill and reconnect the wifi connection
2) Nice-to-have: the My Cloud app should be able to keep the device from going to sleep while it’s open and backing up, so that I don’t need to explicitly disable auto-lock in screen settings first.
One note: I didn’t notice such stability issues before I formatted the drive to NTFS, only after. That said, the drive was painful to use before that, so I may have simply not used it enough to notice.
Hmm, more info: After trying extensively to reset, I’ve noticed that, after a fresh reset, on initial system configuration, the drive has no problem joining my home wifi. After power cycling, whether the network is remembered, or whether I’ve manually forgotten it and reconfigured it, I simply cannot join again.
@mike27oct I realize that iOS is a bit of a pain in the butt about long-running tasks, and that you simply aren’t allowed to process anything in the background for longer than 10 minutes. BUT that’s not the core of the issue I see here, it’s just the instigating factor. Given that you can only run a task for 10 minutes, I’d expect the phone to auto-lock, then 10m later the backup task gets killed by iOS. Then, when I re-open the app, it just resumes from where it was. Yeah, it’s not great, but at least it makes 10m of progress each time i’m in the app. Or, I can (as that post suggests) disable auto-lock for the sake of getting the backup out of the way. That would take care of the initial big job, then hopefully subsequent backups take less than 10m each time since there’s less to do.
There’s a feature improvement over that, I think - I know at least Amazon Cloud Drive has this same problem, where it’s trying to back up your whole photo library but that might take a long time. Especially since it’s loading data to the internet, not a locally connected pretty-fast wifi HD. Somehow, their app will keep itself open, as long as you leave it in the foreground. So, instead of having to manually disable auto-lock, you just open the app. It’ll STAY open, and not let the phone lock, as long as you don’t leave the app to do something else. Perfectly fine for the workflow of “open app, leave face down on the nightstand plugged in overnight to back up all the photos, come back in the morning and it’s done”. Cool.
But what I’m calling a BUG is that the WD My Cloud app doesn’t accomplish even the baseline, should-behave-this-way-without-additional-effort case. When I close the app and re-open it, suddenly my MPWP is totally unusable until manually disconnecting the wifi and reconnecting. THAT is a bug, not just an annoying limitation of iOS. I think it’s losing its brains about the state of the connection to the device when the backup task gets interrupted by iOS ungracefully killing the process.
Yes, and that’s a perfectly functional workaround to get the job done. But it still shouldn’t be the case that the system falls apart when the phone goes to sleep.
Whatever. So, have you notified WD SUPPORT exactly what they should do about Apple’s problem? Complaining in this user forum does not notify WD Support.
