Apologies in advance if I missed soemthing, but I searched the forums and found nothing relevant to my issue. We used to have a WD ShareSpace drive and it ran well for years, but now we’ve proactively replaced it with a WD My Cloud EX2 drive. When setting up folder shares on the old drive, if a user did not have permissions to a particular folder, they could not see it when they were browsing the EX2’s folder in Windows Explorer. On the new drive, however, they can see these folders. It would be much nicer if users did not have to see folders like “Finance”, “Engineering”, etc, unless they had access to them. This would both enhance security as well as save time so users don’t have to see the folders they don’t have access to. Is there a way to do this? Thanks in advance any help you may offer.
Hi there.
Welcome into the EX2 family and all its problems. Unfortunately this is one of them.
It would be a great feature.
Hi. Good idea. But I have a question. How would you like to see this implimented?
For example using Windows interface, what if you were on someone elses’ computer and wanted to access the passworded and hidden folder: then how would you access the folder to be prompted to enter the password?
Or even as admin and on your own computer: how would you first access the hidden folder to be prompted to enter the password, and thus prove you are an authorized user?
Or was your idea to have these restrictions in a non-windows interface (WD Dashboard file access)?
An idea I have is the passworded shares could be set to be hidden from the windows inteface. Then to access them and prove you are a user (by entering the password), you would have to manually type in the network address “\EX2[folder name].”
Then windows would prompt you for a password. You could set it to remember pass. Then that folder would no longer be hidden to you (yet still hidden to others if they did not know the folder name to type into the address bar).
Would that be acceptable as hidden?
Edit: another option:
You can make a big folder that is passworded. For simplicity, ill call it “Private.” You restrict access to this folder by setting up the user rights using the WD Dashboard.
Then manually go to this folder using your windows network interface. Open this “Private” folder, and inside of that put your other folders with names that you want hidden.
Then only the users who can access “Private” will be able to see the folder names inside. You can change “Private” to a less conspicuous meaning.
user55 wrote:
Hi. Good idea. But I have a question. How would you like to see this implimented?
For example using Windows interface, what if you were on someone elses’ computer and wanted to access the passworded and hidden folder: then how would you access the folder to be prompted to enter the password?
Or even as admin and on your own computer: how would you first access the hidden folder to be prompted to enter the password, and thus prove you are an authorized user?
Or was your idea to have these restrictions in a non-windows interface (WD Dashboard file access)?
An idea I have is the passworded shares could be set to be hidden from the windows inteface. Then to access them and prove you are a user (by entering the password), you would have to manually type in the network address “\EX2[folder name].”
Then windows would prompt you for a password. You could set it to remember pass. Then that folder would no longer be hidden to you (yet still hidden to others if they did not know the folder name to type into the address bar).
Would that be acceptable as hidden?
Edit: another option:
You can make a big folder that is passworded. For simplicity, ill call it “Private.” You restrict access to this folder by setting up the user rights using the WD Dashboard.
Then manually go to this folder using your windows network interface. Open this “Private” folder, and inside of that put your other folders with names that you want hidden.
Then only the users who can access “Private” will be able to see the folder names inside. You can change “Private” to a less conspicuous meaning.
Once you try to access the nas from any Win PC with \wdmycloudex2 or \ip it will first promt you for credentials. Therefore, once you type in the credentials, all the folders that you have access to will be promted, hidden or not.
Also, even if you try to map a hidden folder, you can map it with the full path and add your user credentials and it should work.
A hidden folder on the nas means it’s not visible to the users who do not have access to it.
So no access problem here
Ok. So you are saying the hide feature could work (and be accessable to the intended person), if this was a feature.
But since it’s not a feature, then would you say my method works? Or do you see any loophole to get around my hide method?
I tried and it worked for me at hidding folder names (inside the big folder), from others without access.
user55 wrote:
Ok. So you are saying the hide feature could work (and be accessable to the intended person), if this was a feature.
But since it’s not a feature, then would you say my method works? Or do you see any loophole to get around my hide method?
I tried and it worked for me at hidding folder names (inside the big folder), from others without access.
Almost all IT professionals have their hidden folders on SHOW from windows, so if you make a shared folder at the same tree level as public folders ( for example) I will see them. Can’t access them, but see them for sure. So it depends on what kind of person you’re dealing with
If you create a hidden folder inside a password protected folder, it’s pointless, because noone else can access the root folder in the beggining, so why hide something that is already hidden ?
Thanks to User55 and Adicrst for your input.
User55’s idea is workable and certainly improves the lack of a feature that allows what I Microsoft calls “access-based enumeration” (years ago I installed a hack on Server 2003 so that it would only show folders that a user had NTFS permissions to). I was hoping for a way to simply allow the user to first authenticate to the EX2 and after that is done, see only those folders that their login has access to. One way WD might have done this (if they had the feature) was to show only a master folder that the user could double click and then be prompted to enter their credentials, and then the user would only see those folders that their login has permissions for. This is the way I think I would have designed the EX2 to work.
As I see it, the biggest drawback with creating a separate folder that would house only the restricted folders is that each user has their own unique combination of folders that they need access to. For example, if UserA needs access to Finance and Engineering but UserB needs access to Finance and Marketing but NOT Engineering, there is no way to accomplish that. In other words, if you have only one set of restricted folders and all who need access to that particular group of folders need access to that group and no others, User55’s method would work well. I guess one could create many users and each has access to particular combination of folders, but that would obviously quickly get complicated and unmanageable.
Thanks for your helpful thoughts, though. Any other ideas?
fommco wrote:
Thanks for your helpful thoughts, though. Any other ideas?
I’ve been looking at other NAS companies ( real ones 
) and they have a live demo of their OS. But i didn’t saw this feature to hide a folder. Then again, I don’t own one so i can’t say for sure, but take a look at: QNap, Synology, Asustor.
Best solution is to buy a HP Microserver Gen8 and install Windows server and no more headaches.
