Deleting files in my cloud home does not free space

I got a PM saying I should open a case with support. That’s ongoing now, I keep you guys posted. Apparently there are a lot of people having these problems. I frankly don’t understand why WD doesn’t provide a public answer addressing this issue. Or even better an update to fix this!

another ticket opened and they don’t give us any solution

This is the final reply I got from WD:

Thank you for all the additional information. We have escalated the reported issue to our engineering department for further review, analysis and duplication. Any resolution or fix would be delivered in the form of a future device, mobile app, software or firmware update. Unfortunately, we cannot provide a schedule as to when a release will occur or if a resolution or fix, will or will not be included in a specific release version. We appreciate your patience and understanding and apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused.

Currently in order to offer a work around please proceed with the following on your My Cloud Home,

  1. Copy all critical data to another device
  2. System Erase My Cloud Home to Factory Settings
  3. Set My Cloud Home up again.
    My Cloud Home Setup and Configuration
    How to Setup and Configure a My Cloud Home Device
  4. Copy all data back to My Cloud Home

Wow, gruesome thread.

I have a much older wdmycloud that doesn’t do this, however I may be able to help.

These devices run Linux. On a Linux system, the disk space is not freed until the file handle is closed by the last program that has it open. Don’t these things have media indexers running? I’ve disabled that on my wdcloud since I don’t use it. But also, you could have these files open via a windows share or even nfs.

Regardless, if this is the case, then a reboot should free the space. If it doesn’t, then the only other possible way for the space to not be freed is if there is a hard link to these files. A hard link is simply another name pointing to the exact same file contents and the disk space isn’t freed until the last name is removed. Hard links don’t just make themselves. It would be a process on the wdmycloud doing this. Again, I do not own this device, but do know Linux quite well. It could, for example, be part of a Trash Can strategy.

If you have shell access to the wdmycloud, you can diagnose these scenarios. Hardlinks are names that have the same inode number, so they’re tricky to find. Google will help, though we are deep into advanced systems administration at this point, something the end consumer shouldn’t have to deal with. Maybe the developers can sort it out.

My advice for end users is to disable anything you don’t need on these devices. The less that’s running, the less there is to go wrong.

Wow… and from the fact that no ones seems to have come up with an answer for fixing this since 2017, I guess it means repeating this on a regular basis when space is becoming an issue?

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Want just resolution then read from “What I did”

It has been 2 weeks and it was quite frustrating when I was not able to make any space in my cloud, I own a 4 Tb my cloud home, so did a lot of digging, searched a lot of webpages, read comments in hope to find some good answer, even tried to ask help from WD, but they ■■■■ lol, I got same reply back from WD customer service, as another person on this forum got, they wanted me to make a back up and then restore and then try to use again, but it’s so easy for them to just simply say this!

I mean it’s 4 Tb and my cloud is always full, it took a while to fill that space with quality content which I wanted!

Hey, I’m not a tech savvy or some IT person, but have common understanding of what possibly I could have done while making my cloud work.

See, my problem of zero byte started after few weeks of using Plex, basically I transferred all my data in Plex, to the shared folder with movies, series and music and it looked good, I was quite happy.

But there were some TV series which I was going to watch once, so i’m not going to keep it hanging there and use my space, so on Plex app just before playing my video on TV, I was able to see details of that video and I could even delete my files, so it was pretty cool, that I don’t have to remember which episode I have to delete from my laptop.

All episodes were getting deleted and I was uploading new content oftenly, then after few weeks I came across that i’m shortage of space, I was wondering why, then I sacrificed “lol” to delete my whole another TV series which was least worth of my time to watch and I knew it will make around 80 GB of space for me which would have been cool, for me to keep uploading new content to watch and then deleting older one which I was watching and not going to keep.

But bam space problem, there was no space there it suddenly ended up to some bytes like 124 or 167 every time and then zero byte! Seriously and it was like what the heck what should I be doing.

With failed WD attempt to help me by saying to copy my data and restore my cloud

I thought to analyze the root cause of my problem, I was using my cloud for 3 years and it never occurred I had to check anything on internet to make space on my cloud, then I thought what I did in oder to get in this trouble, it was “Plex”, maybe, maybe not, but I had to do something, so hit and try in order to find out what can help me.

“What I did!”

  • Plex, I enabled through my browser from my cloud account and installed an app
  • I did everything from my laptop
  • So whenever I access app on my laptop it shows 2 folder, “my cloud” and “Plex”
  • I moved all my content from “Plex” folder back to “my cloud”
  • Deleted “only” Plex folder with “command+option+delete” (for windows most probably it will alt+clt+del) and then hit that delete key which pops up
  • Magically I didn’t had to wait for some days or hours in few seconds my space from zero bytes came to 119Gb, I was back on track (I read in some comments WD is saying to wait for like some hours or some days, what BS is that how you should wait, which internet speed we are using, FYI my internet speed is 500 mbps, so accordingly please let your computer handle the time, it can depends on your processing speed of computer/laptop as well, but pretty sure it will not take days or hours)
  • So, I remembered this, that whenever we delete any data, it actually doesn’t just simply delete, it just makes and shows space to us, so basically data it’s still there in your hard drives,(it’s just going to be erase when you restore or do a clean wipe up or do an overwrite on the same space)
  • Guys, remember if you are not getting space that means your data is not getting deleted(that was in my case and maybe it can be with some other people there as well)

Also, I would like to inform if you don’t have Plex(folder or installed or not using), then maybe give a shot by making a new folder at the outer most entrance where you click and access your cloud, then move all you data to that new folder and try permanently delete option to that particular old folder where you were accessing all you data from(PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU MOVE OR COPY TO NEW FOLDER THEN ONLY DELETE YOUR OLD FOLDER!!).

I mean I’m here just to give information what helped me, so that it can be helpful for anyone out there, maybe it can help maybe it won’t, but that’s worth trying to see if you can get some space, apart putting all your data to another drive, which you may or may not have, then time and internet upload and download waste that gonna occur.

Always think what can be the cause for the problem, in my case root cause was plex, which mostly probably was deleting my files but not off from the server, Plex is not bad at all, it’s a good platform, we need to ensure to manage our data.

Hope this helps someone!

RJ!

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Well, this thread is disheartening. I have the same problem. It’s now 2021 - have WD still not fixed this with a firmware update?

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I’ve had the problem of 686GB used space after deleting files…well, all I did from this thread was go to Settings>General>Services Click Clear…and wait about 10 min through “unresponsive web page” clicking “wait” pop ups as it deletes…

This cleared it to 3.54TB free of 3.57TB…the rest to 4TB is the system stuff as someone mentioned in the thread.

Clear the recycle bin periodically. I don’t have shares or anything but this just cleared the whole recycle bin. I’m starting from scratch with this thing. it is a pesky program. You can’t change file names too quickly and it has to save things before you make changes or it gets a all messed up. best to turn sync off, do all your work then turn it on or you get a million errors and sync issues.

It’s worked

1 Month ago i wrote here in the forum about my Problem but until now no single answer…i deleted even more files but there is no space free…I don’t understand…In my User space says that i use 89% of the space from 20 TB, so i should have 10% free, but overall i have zero % free…What can i do? Please give some support!!

Hey! I had the same issue today.
I went to mycloud.com and rebooted the device.
Having done that free space percentage showed correct under the mycloud app.
However, right click and get info were still showing old values.
It was a matter of signing out and back in,
Free space showing as expected.

Hope this helps someone!
Best

Figured out the solution !!! Disclaimer: I am not an IT guy. I used part commands given to me by WD support (semi useless) and part commands from dicking around with those commands using commands (rm -r) from the Linus web pages. This worked for me.

putty into your NAS
login as: sshd
sshd@'s password: for your NAS

Optional: to see what’s going on in your NAS
enter cd /mnt/HD/HD_a2 du -h --max-depth=1 (WD support)

This will take a while, but you will see that something in /mnt/HD/HD_a2/.systemfile is taking up TBs of disk space. This is the dir /clamav

To see what is in that dir,
enter du /mnt/HD/HD_a2/.systemfile/clamav
You will see it’s a few dirs all containing a butt load of .tmp files and ONLY tmp files

The fix: Erase those tmp files by erasing the /clamav dir (irreversible, do you trust me?)
enter rm -r /mnt/HD/HD_a2/.systemfile/clamav/

This will also take a while, but not as long as the first command. You will see that all your missing storage space is now available again. I gained back over 1.5 TB of missing storage.

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Thanks therapy80301, though not quite the same as your solution, the clues you gave me in your posting helped me find my missing 3tb!
In my case it seems to have been caused when WD did an update to the firmware and OS for the WD MYCLOUD Home, They changed the cloud access which required the creation of new cloud accounts along with new share accounts. However, these are case sensitive and data in the old shares was not accessible under the new (slightly different case) share names. Mostly these contained old backups I had taken and that are now no longer required. Using Putty software and the command du -h --max-depth=1 highlighted what folders were holding the missing space (in my case that was not the /mnt/HD/HD_a2/.systemfile).

WD - looking at the trail of posts for this thread, you could have given similar information as to how to identify what was using space on the system. Beats me why you didn’t.

Thanks again therapy80301.

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The only way that you could use Putty on the My Cloud Home is to take out the HDD, install Entware and enable SSH and void all warranty in the process. So the last two posts in this My Cloud Home subforum thread really don’t apply to the MCH for most users of this unit.

It’s there some solutions? I have the same problem.

I have read through so much on this thread and others regarding this. Tried signing out and signing back in. Tried rebooting etc. Nothing works. There has to be some way of me seeing the true figure of how much space I have left on MyCloud Home? Someone, please?

Obviously this is an ancient thread however I just ran into this issue. Waited the “required time” to no avail. For me the SOLUTION WAS go to Recycle bin in the web UI and delete it. It updated in real time.

It’s seems silly, but I was able to start the indexing process by choosing MANAGE DEVICE - Clear device settings (dropdown in the top right corner).
It would reset your settings without deleting users or data.
It takes time, but space is freeing.

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This appears to be the solution for the My Cloud Home and it seems to be documented recently (01/25/2023) but not obviously applied to this topic. Well done and useful for those who had deleted large amount of data recently and can’t wait to re-index and reclaim free space.

Details

Answer ID 50395
Published 01/25/2023 02:23 PM

Right, but in my case “recently” is smth about 2 years.