Help - want to backup MyCloud to iDrive?

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1

Hi

I have a MacBook Pro with 3TB of files/apps/data.

I want to do the 3-2-1 backup. 3x backups, 2x onsite and 1x offsite.

I have a local 4TB external hard drive and a ‘NAS’ “4TB WD MyCloud” as my onsite backups (using TimeMachine) and want to sync/copy the onsite NAS “WD MyCloud” to an off-site cloud service (ie iDrive).

Where can I find out how to do this please.

Thanks

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WD MyCloud NAS does not support iDrive with any on-board app as of March 2024.

It’s a glaring shortfall in the platform given that iDrive is really the leading and only affordable solution out there for cloud archive of more than 2 TB of data. The other services (OneDrive, Google Drive, either don’t offer in excess of 2 TB for a single user or get prohibitively expensive.) iDrive is the best option out there, but WD MyCloud does not support it. Really, the only provided “App” that supports archiving to cloud storage is GoodSync, but that does not support backing up to iDrive.

There is a way to make it partly work, but it is not ideal… Install iDrive on your desktop machine. In Windows, set up a high level folder on your My Cloud NAS as a mapped network drive on your desktop machine. Ie, enable file sharing, assign a drive letter, and set it up to automatically reconnect when the computer starts up. iDrive can then be used to backup this mapped drive.

The problems are…

  1. It will be slow, because the backup has to read the file list remotely over slower local network, which can take hours over wifi. And then it needs to copy each file from the NAS over the local network to your desktop machine and then back again over the local network to your router and then up to the cloud server. This is painful over wifi. And this is much slower than if you had your WD NAS speaking directly to the cloud server.

  2. iDrive, unfortunately, will not “clean up” cloud archives of external or mapped drives. When its an internal drive, iDrive will periodically “clean up” the cloud archive, deleting files that have been deleted from the local drive being backed up. This clears out old files that are no longer needed and effectively syncs the backup with the local drive. When its an external or mapped drive though, iDrive only adds files to the archive. Deletions must be done manually… either on file at a time, or whole directories, which supposedly will then refresh on the next scheduled backup. So the cloud archive will only grow, not be kept in sync with the data being backed up. Again, this limitation in iDrive only applies to external and mapped drives. I’m guessing it has something to do with the slow speed associated with those types of drives.

By contrast, Synology has on-board support for iDrive backup direct to the iDrive cloud service. I really wish WD support this for the My Cloud NAS as well. If I had realized before buying, I probably would not have purchased it.