I’ve installed a My Cloud device and I installed WD Sync on my PC. In the WD Sync settings I can go to folders and hit “Add” and pick any folder on my PC to synch to my My Cloud. Perfect.
Now I’ve installed WD Sync on my Android phone and on my daughter’s iPad, but I can’t seem to find how to do the same thing for those devices.
Am I missing something obvious or is this functionality simply not supported for these devices? I would especially like to implement it for my daughter’s iPad as she does her school homework on it and it would be backed up nicely if I could get it to work!
WD Sync for Android or iOS? There isn’t a “WD Sync” app for Android or iOS. What there is, is an app called WD My Cloud for Android or iOS that has an option to sync/upload to the My Cloud media (video/photos) from the mobile device to the My Cloud.
Do you want to create a folder on the local mobile device or create a folder on the My Cloud? To create a folder on the My Cloud (at least on Android) one can select New Folder from the top right option menu (3 vertical circle icon). It appears to create a Share (top level folder) on the My Cloud, one would need to use the My Cloud Dashboard.
To create a local folder on the mobile device it appears the WD My Cloud app (at least on Android) does not support that option. Instead one could use a file manager app for their mobile device to create new folders on the mobile device.
Hi Bennor… yes, indeed. I searched for WD Sync in the Play Store c.q. app thingy on the iPad, and it brought me straight to the WD My Cloud app; I just assumed they were more or less the same thing. Apparently they’re not.
Yes, both the iOS and the Android one nicely sync the media on those devices. When I take a picture on my Android, I eventually find it on the My Cloud at home, so they’re backed up fine.
My daughter, however, does her homework on her iPad. Through her school they get MS Office on their device. She creates Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, Powerpoint Presentations. These are, I guess, stored in some folder or other on her iPad. I would like to link that folder up to my My Cloud so all those files get backed up to there.
But I don’t want to create a new folder on the device. I want to link an existing folder on the device so it gets synched with a remote folder on the My Cloud.
Copy and Move would be grand if I wanted to do a one-off backup on an ad-hoc basis. I understand that I could use Copy and copy data from my Android or from my daughter’s iPad device to the WD My Cloud at home.
I guess it’s better than nothing, but it’s not the same as a system that automatically keeps those files synchronized between the two
Ok… never mind… I found a crazy solution that works, because she’s got a School OneDrive account that she’s already synching to. So I set up a local folder on my PC and synched it to her OneDrive account AS WELL as our My Drive. So we got the functionality to work by using my PC as a “middle man”. Bit naff, but it works, so meh.
Glad to hear you solved your problem, but, here is what I was talking about. This is copied from the User Manual.
Syncing Files and Folders After installing the WD Sync software, to sync a file or folder on your computer, use your computer’s file management utility to copy and paste or drag and drop it into the WD Sync folder. The WD Sync software automatically copies it first to the WD Sync folder on your My Cloud device and then to any other computers connected to it. After that, the WD Sync software automatically updates any changes to the file, at any location, on the other configured devices.
“to sync a file or folder on your computer” - It’s an iPad, not a (PC/laptop) computer.
“copy and paste or drag and drop” - Here’s what’s wrong with that suggestion. When you install WD Sync, the software creates a local folder, say C:\users\yourusernamehere\documents\My Cloud to synchronise with. Say I wanted to synchronize the content of C:\myfolder. You’re suggesting that I should drag and drop, i.e. copy, the C:\myfolder folder into that location. That will, first of all, create local copies from the originals in C:\myfolder in a new folder at C:\users\yourusernamehere\documents\My Cloud\myfolder, and WD Sync will synchronise the latter rather than the former. It would be up to me to manually keep the two local folders in sync.
Of course for me on my own PC there is no problem at all. I don’t have to do any of the above. I just have to click on the WD icon in my system tray, click “Settings” from the context menu, and under “Local Folders” I can simply add “C:\myfolder” to the list, and sync it with any folder on my My Cloud that I wish. Easy peasy.
But I can’t do that on my daughter’s iPad. I can’t see any way to enter an equivalent “Settings” dialog (or whatever they call it in Apple land) or to link a local storage location to a folder on my My Cloud. I can’t see any way to change the location where my daughter stores her homework either - as it turns out, in fact, she stores her homework in a OneDrive location, which led me to the crazy solution I described above. But even if she had been storing it locally, to expect her to manually keep her real local folder and the copy in whatever the iPad equivalent of the “WD Sync folder” is synchronised would have been a recipe for disaster.
My understanding is that the WD Sync folder is special; files copied to it are not copied locally. I don’t use WD sync, though, too flaky.
Cat0w’s instructions were taken from the WD documentation. Don’t blame him if you think WD’s instructions make no sense.
You started the WD Sync confusion by saying you installed it on your Android device and iPad. You cannot have done this, since no WD sync app exists for Android or iOS; the WD Mobile apps for Android and iOS have very limited functionality.
I’m not blaming cat0w for anything… Apologies if it comes across like that.
I’m not sure I can be convinced that the “WD Sync” folder is that special. It may be “special” from the perspective of the WD Sync application. That would make sense. But from the perspective of my OS it wouldn’t be special at all. Just another location on the C: drive.
I accept that I started the confusion, but I was as confused as anybody here. When I went to the Google Play Store on Android and whateverit’scalled on iPad and I searched for “WD Sync” it brought me straight to “WD My Cloud”. I assumed, and I’m happy to accept that I assumed wrongly and I made an eejit of myself doing so, that if I searched for “WD Sync” and it brought me straight to “WD My Cloud” that it was actually telling me “yeah, you’re searching for this but we refer to it as that so here you go.” - There was nothing in the blurb around the app to alert me to the fact that I may be getting something slightly different to what I was actually looking for.
I did a bit of testing here and it’s left me even more confused. I created a “helloworld.txt” file on the desktop, and right-dragged it into the WD Sync folder, choosing “copy” rather than “move” from the context menu. As I suspected, when I made changes to the original on the desktop, these were not reflected in the copy in the folder.
However…
I also did a move at some stage, and having realised my mistake (I meant to copy), moved it back to the desktop. Did a bit of faffing about, and eventually hit Ctrl+DEL to Permanently Delete the file, and as I did so, a new file named something like “helloworld-2017-12-10-andsomemorenumbersherethatIsuspectrepresentthetime.txt” suddenly appeared in the WD Sync folder.
So, yeah… it does look like the WD Sync folder is treated as “special” alright, even to the point of the OS keeping some kind of linkage between stuff that is, or used to be, in that folder at some point, and original locations. But I can also see how it would be - as you put it - “flaky” as my other test as mentioned in the first paragraph did not appear to establish any link whatsoever between the original and its copy.
I think I’ll steer clear of that folder!
Thanks for the help and the suggestions - everybody!
yes very true… Lesson learnt!