I have just bought the MyCloud Home at the recommendation of an ‘expert’ at PC World. I explained I had 6 hard drives in my current computer but I was going to be buying a new computer and didn’t want to put the 6 drives back in but to use a centralised place to pick up all the info that was currently on these drives. He said I should by this, which I did - the 6TB version. Been reading through the manual and it looks like this is basically so I can pick up all the info from whatever folders from my current drives I want to ‘share’. This isn’t what I wanted as I want to basically get rid of the 6 hard drives. I told him I thought I needed a NAS but he told me this was the best way forward. Have I been sold a bit of a white elephant?
@nikwak It doesn’t sound like the My Cloud Home is what you want. Have you visited the Learning Center and checked out the different devices available? Watch some of the videos.
I have two WD My Clouds, a 4TB 1st generation and a 3TB 2nd generation. They are mainly to back up my Desktop and Laptop to. My phone also backs up to them mainly with photos and videos I take with it. It is nice that I can access them when away from home too.
It is hard to say if you got the right device, How do you use the data you already have stored? What kind of data is it, e.g. mostly documents/spreadsheets or media files that you sometimes stream to play on other devices?
A HOME device is not a NAS although they are similar in that both connect to home router for easy access through network devices, yet a NAS has many more features.
Maybe all you need is a larger 6TB hard drive you can connect to your PC and consolidate your current data. This device is called a My Book.
Check out the HOME and ENTERTAINMENT storage solutions at WD site.
Yeah - it’s stuff that I use quite a bit - spreadsheets, word documents etc
It doesn’t appear you store much media for streaming. I suggest all you need is a My Book drive unless you need to access them remotely then a NAS would be handy.
So. . . . this is an interesting topic. “What is the point of these products”.
I am a private person, spouting stuff on the internet. Feel free to critique what I say;
The “My Cloud Home” is fundamentally a low end NAS solution.
The intent of the “My Cloud” stuff is to simply put a hard drive onto your network so that it can be accessed easily by any device on your network.
My “any device”, I mean PC’s, phones, tablets, streaming devices attached to your TV. So if you put your six HD’s worth of data onto a “my Cloud Home”, and attach the device to your router, then it is essentially a storage device on the network (Network Attached Storage).
I call these products “low end” because. . .in the basic form they tend to have low end processors and only a single drive. Most “big boy” NAS boxes have a bunch of hard drives, formatted for redundancy (you can fail a drive without compromising data), and a decent processor with decent RAM. The processor and ram enable to the NAS box to do funky things like manage automatic system backups and media server software. I like using my NAS as a media server as well as a file server.
Here’s the rub: Your WD NAS device is also available to the Internet. You can access data using the MyCloud App (or website) from a device anywhere on the planet.
The My Cloud Home (I think) actually requires the internet to function (yikes). I don’t have one. . .but I am pretty sure you can’t block the internet from the device and have it work.
The older “My Cloud” products (Personal Cloud?) use older software that doesn’t require the internet to function. There is actually more functionality in these older products (the new stuff is definitely geared to the new user. . . and is a bit less flexible and “dumbed down”) HOWEVER, being older, they don’t appear to be fully upto snuff in the 2019 security environment. Don’t get me wrong. . .they seem to work well enough, but not as “secure” as the new stuff.
I have a few Personal Cloud products. . . .I like them. I ran them for over a year before I realized that I wasn’t properly shielding them from the internet. Frankly, unless I go to deliberate specific port blocking on my router. . .not sure I can! Now I am embracing the internet functionality (to a degree)
From what I read, I don’t think I would be happy with the Home Cloud stuff because of what has been removed in the names of “simplicity” and “security”. Note that the more expensive WD NAS products are running versions of the basic Personal Cloud software.
