Western Digital has allowed enable-local-access on the My Cloud Home (MCH) for about 8 months now, and yet the same question is being asked repeatedly. All your files are accessible through SMB on the local network, you’ll just have to enable it - WD has been sending emails about local access to all its users for the last 7 months.
Please watch the introductory short video on enabling local access. Historically and by design only certain shared folders of the MCH can be seen through cloud access, but recently those folders can be enabled for local access - that is why WD has an introduction to this feature, a short video and several notifications and emails to every MCH user.
Our newest video! How To: Enable and Disable Local Network Access on your My Cloud Home | Western Digital Support
This procedure is applicable for existing users of My Cloud Home and My Cloud Home Duo. This procedure will only enable access via network mapped drives on a local network, and those network mapped drives will only provide data for the individual user account which has local access enabled. Up to 5 local users can concurrently access data using this method.
The primary (and ONLY) use of my MyCloud Home was as a storage hub for all of my media which I accessed through Plex. I know a lot of people may have lost accessibility when it comes to WD Discovery a long ago, but for me, I had access up until yesterday. Will the method thats being described above (enabling Local Network Access) allow me to continue to remotely access my media account when away from my home? If this is not the case, then my next move is finding another NAS thats comparable to my MyCloud Home.
I know when I buy a product for it’s advertised functionality I too think it’s not that big of a deal the company just completely discontinues support for it (while STILL selling it on their website) and sunsetting the app that makes it function.
“All you have to do is enable SMB” ← huge security risk and “one terminal command for the optional subnet router”… BRO, I work all week, I have a family, I want to sit on my couch and watch movies, not get a CCNA certification and spend the rest of my time ensuring I didn’t open up too many security holes.
Appreciate the information but if you think even a fraction of the people who purchased these lemons are going to go make registry level changes to enable SMB and use a third party hack to get functionality back you’re dreaming. I bought a product that worked, not an IKEA product, I don’t WANT to have to do all of this, that was what the software was for.
Stop running defense for blatantly awful customer service, sure, you hack together a workaround but of the handful of people who will actually attempt this, the majority will get this wrong and/or run into issues which, they won’t know how to fix because they’re not Network-trained. I didn’t buy a Raspberry-Pi with an attached HDD, we bought an NAS and there is nothing you can say that changes that fact. Vent over, I’m going on Amazon to find a company that makes a product that they won’t get bored of supporting one day after I gave them $500.
Local access means just that - it is as if the drive is accessible from one desktop to another on the same LAN. It doesn’t automatically allow remote access, but the described Tailscale from the link above allows remote access made as easily as it could be done for home users without buying additional hardware.
You should absolutely look for alternatives if you are able to do so. I am not here to sell anyone anything. All the information is available freely and the Tailscale service mentioned is free for personal use.
I notice there you go again with the CCNA and that coming from a ‘software developer’. God bless you for spending a few minutes reading the knowledge base and this subforum, but you know little about what you are talking about. Tailscale is a mesh VPN service, very much like the VPN that is running the My Cloud Home except Tailscale is free for personal use whether you buy anything from them. In addition, Tailscale has had SSO and MFA since its inception, something MCH only obtained recently. Tailscale has also passed SCO2 certification, something the entire Western Digital corporation network has never been able to do. That makes Tailscale, which is using Wireguard end to end encryption, as secured as a free product is likely to have.
Nonsense. Tailscale is not exposing any part of the SMB to the internet because it is a VPN with MF authentication and Wireguard end to end encryption.
There is no registry level change I know of to enable SMB. The enable-local-access is all coming from the server side, in the samba.conf file of the My Cloud Home.
If you are calling a VPN such as Tailscale a hack then I suppose you could call WD Discovery a hack and all the VPNs that Apple, Microsoft and Google use a hack as well.
Even Microsoft has stopped support for Windows 7 and Windows 8. The My Cloud Home is more than 5 years old and if WD is still advertising the WD Discovery functionality on their website then they should take it down, but they are selling the MCH primarily as a personal cloud storage and it has done well in that capacity without any security breach to the My Cloud Home unit itself in its history.
It is clear that the MCH is near the end of its useful service life, you can claim anything you like against the company but for what it was, it has done its job.
You said a mouthful!! I do think it’s pretty ■■■■■■ that I paid a couple of hundred dollars for my drive not even that long ago, and now it’s basically an expensive paperweight.
Yes I’m a Software Developer, not a Networking Specialist, I know enough about technology to know what I don’t know.
Honest question, are you getting paid to run defense for WD? Are they giving you free products or something? I am not used to this level of pro-bono bootlicking.
Also, I never asked to be sold anything. I asked for camaraderie, in our shared use of WD’s products, in your sharing of whether or not you knew of any comparable products to the WD MyCloud Home I own. I would’ve understood if the answer to that question was no, or even if you didn’t reply to it at all. Telling me you’re not here to sell implies that I asked to be sold to…and I did not. Thus, my confusion over your response.
There are certain types of people who spent a few minutes reading a subforum and they seem to think that they know everything about the subject or the posters, which they then admitted that didn’t know very much.
If I were benefiting from WD, Why would I write about a competing VPN such as Tailscale or yet another brand of personal cloud here in this WD forum thread, without mentioning it’s name just to be fair, and then do a review on that particular personal cloud storage?
Almost all the knowledge about the MCH and a lot about personal cloud storage is here on the forum, it just takes time to digest it. But It is perfectly fine to sit on your couch, but please don’t accuse others of ‘bootlicking’ for merely offering free or low cost alternatives that are in fact not even beneficial for Western Digital.
I have local network access enabled for my main user, but when I connect to the MCH fron Windows (10) using the local user credentials, all I see are the Public and TimeMachineBackup shares. I’ve read and reread all the articles and I can’t decide if I should be able to see my private files using local access or not. Can someone clarify?
