Files get lost / corrupted

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

I’m writing on behalf of a friend of mine. They have purchased WD MyCloud (the Mirror version with 2-bays) and using it with several Mac computers and iPhones. They do a lot of office (Excel in particular). They open the file in My Cloud by double clicking on it.

However, a particular file is lost after a while on My Cloud. It’s not visible anymore. Instead, a file starting with a tilde (“~”) is displayed, with an UNIX timestamp and the name of the file. But that file has only 0.1 KB of size and cannot be opened by Excel, as it’s not the original file (which is about 65 KB). As I was unsure what’s the reason for this, I’d go for a software bug. As far as I understand (I have absolutely no clue on how it works, i just guess), My Cloud works by downloading the file to the local disk when opened inside the My Cloud app (at least the file is named “unixtimestamp-filename.xlsx”) and using filesystem watchers to write it back to cloud when modified. Somehow the file gets corrupted while writing to disk. This does not apply to all Excel files, just to that single on. It happened quite a few times recently and they asked me for help.

Does anyone know why that happens, or what could be the reason for this?

2

Instead, a file starting with a tilde (“~”) is displayed

That’s what Excel does; it creates a temporary file called ~file.xlsx

Open an Excel file on a PC HDD, and you’ll see it does the same thing. It’s nothing to do with the MyCloud.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=excel+tilde+files

Sometimes, the file isn’t deleted when Excel (or other Office program) closes, and I guess it has been copied to the NAS. The original file should be there somewhere, too.

1 Like
3

I’m aware that Excel creates such temporary files for backup purposes. But as I said, the original file is gone on My Cloud (and on the Mac itself, as it just opens the file from My Cloud). It looks like the transfer to My Cloud gets interrupted, so the file is not written completely and not being renamed to the original file. However, the original file is removed before that happens.