This just might be your lucky day that I saw your post, because during this past month or so I have been doing what you want to do – except in reverse! I have been copying files from external drives to a new N900C w/HD via my laptop computers.
Here’s why I was doing this: I bought a new, “open box” N900C from eBay real cheap. SO cheap, that I will be using it as a dual-band router with my media files on its 1TB drive to take with us on summer vacation trips. I call it my oversized “wireless drive” to throw in the car trunk along with luggage, and we can use it at our destination so we can stream videos to our tablets, stream music to speakers, etc.
OK, the bottom line request of yours is “how do I get the data on the N900C drive copied off of it so I can put the files somewhere else?” Right? Yes. Easy. I will explain how by telling you the opposite of what I had been doing.
You will need:
Your N900C near your Win 8 computer. Plugged in and turned on, with no wires attached to it (yet).
You need your computer and a long enough Ethernet cable (CAT5e or better) to connect your computer and N900C together
You need a portable hard drive (or any external hard drive) you will connect to your computer USB port. Your N900C has either a 1TB or 2TB drive inside, and if the drive is real full, then you need a drive of the same capacity as what is in the N900C.
Next, connect one end of the Ethernet cable into one of the four output ports of the N900C. Unplug the Ethernet cable going into your PC, and plug the other end of the Ethernet cable (that’s now connected to the N900C) into the Ethernet port of your PC (where you just unplugged the “internet” cable from). You now have your PC and N900C directly connected to one another’s Ethernet ports.
Next, plug the hard drive you will be using into the PC’s USB port.
Hopefully, you can make Win 8’s tiles go away (so it looks more like a Win 7 screen) and you can get to the Windows File Explorer. look at your File Explorer screen and you see This PC and Network section on left panel of screen. Refresh both Computer and Network, by clicking on it and then clicking on the Refresh button (the curved arrow near top right of screen)
If all is going well, you should now be able to locate the hard drive under This Computer, and in Network, you will see your PC’s name and under that, your will see MyNETN900C listed. You now can see the hard drive and the N900C in File Explorer. I like to see two windows; one for each device on the wide screen laptop.
OK, click to open MyNET900C and if you have left the drive at its default setup, you will see one folder named Public. Open Public and find the folder(s) where you put your data. Perhaps you have used the default folders of Shared Music, Shared Pictures and Shared Videos where you put your media files as I did. It is real easy to COPY each of these folders in their entirety to the external hard drive. Maybe you made other folders such as Documents, so copy that one, too. Just copy all the folders with your data to the external hard drive. Forget about the folders/files that pertain to the N900C’s operation, you need them on the N900C, but nowhere else.
OK, so now all your own stuff is copied off of the N900C drive, and you know where you want to copy it from the external hard drive to its destination. Perhaps you have a My Cloud NAS, and you know how to copy to that; not by connecting to the NAS USB, too slow, do it via the computer like you took it from the N900C – keep the drive right on the PC, and copy it via PC through the network to the NAS.
Before you do that, you need to put your PC back together how it was before. You see, we removed it from your network by connecting it directly to the N900C. So, disassemble the PC and N900C connection, plug the “internet” cable back into the PC, and leave the hard drive attached to PC if you are going to dump the files you just took from the N900C to another device like a NAS.
OK, now what to do with the N900C. Well, you can now use it like I plan to use mine! Or, you can connect it to your internet signal by connecting an Ethernet cable from your new router into the N900C input port, although having them real close to one another is no real advantage. I am fortunate to have a house with network wiring in a few rooms, so I could take my second router and put it on the other side of the house if I wanted to and plug it in to network there. You can also, but it like having two separate routers since they share the internet signal but NOT the same network. To share the same network and internet, you could reconfigure the N900C as an Access Point (AP) off the main router via wireless and spread both the network and the internet around your house better. The complete N900C user manual that’s downloadable from WD at www.support.wdc.com tells you how to do this reconfiguration. Get the manual if you don’t have it.
Anyway, that’s about all there is to it. It’s really easier than it all sounds. Let me know if you have any problems, and best of success.