Cannot get My Cloud remote backup to work

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

I just bought two My Cloud 2TB NAS boxes checked for latest firmware it has 2.21.126

I can’t get the Remote Backup to work, between two identical boxes. I’ve tried all the settings and passwords, both machines are online and working fine. I’ve enabled everything, SSH passwords etc. It gets stuck at Browse for destination folder, it just cannot see the other machine.

Anyone else ever got this to work?

2

Remote Cloud backup won’t work between two Version 2 boxes , they don’t run the right software (Remote Server) , if you look at the on-line documentation it tells you which of their other devices you will be able to connect to.

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=11807

3

Yeah, that is really not cool. They’ve disabled Remote Server. I’m starting to figure out the screens don’t match some of the documentation.

I specifically checked the documentation before I bought it, and some reviews. The implication was that it worked. It may have been there in earlier firmware.

4

If this is supposed to be a regularly scheduled backup, a clever misuse of the USB startup script could inject the necessary cron entries to have it schedule an rsync from one nas to the other over sftp, or nfs.

Heavy handed, and sidesteps the dashboard completely, but doable.

5

Yes , the Version 1 boxes used a ‘real’ linux distro that included the ablity to make regular timeable copies (safepoints).

6

I will check shortly to see if rsync is baked into the gen2 busybox. If it is, then it can be called after using the USB user start script method to add a cron job at boot time (so it stays persistent), that calls rsync at the appropriate times. That way one NAS initiates the upload directly to the other, without intervention.

I will look into it shortly.

EDIT-

YES! rsync IS present on Gen2!! It is definitely possible to initiate a backup with a remote host using rsync using the USB based user script method! Needs either a mounted remote filesystem, or a remote host reachable by SSH, or a host running rsync daemon. Most secure would be SSH to remote host, if using two myclouds. The version present appears to support daemon mode as well, meaning one can host the daemon, and the other can connect with it, for the price of two cheap USB drives, and some patience.

7

I am not sure I am following. The issue is that they have disabled the SSH Host on the MyCloud (you need a different NAS model from the list in the first post). i have two of the same Mycloud. The client SSH is there from the web page menus.

Are you saying a USB script can turn on SSH? Or does rsync just see the second Mycloud as a network drive? I use a static IP address for the second.

8

No. There is a method to run a script from an attached USB device, sometimes called the “Fun_plug method” It runs after the final user-level init phase, so all the daemons will be up when it runs.

The script can call rsync, (which I checked, and IS baked in, so you can issue the rsync command from that startup script, and or-- add a cron job using the script to have it fire at certain times. (It will be lost if the nas reboots, because crontab is not persistent, due to being hosted by a ramdisk. If you add it on every boot with the USB start script, you can be assured that it is in the crontab though.) ) which can then update the other NAS directly, and efficiently.