How to read/write from NAS drive outside home network?

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

Hello, hopefully someone can help me sort out how to set up the WD PR2100 NAS drive so that I have full read/write access when I am outside the home network.

I use the NAS drive to house all of my photoshop files, I have it mapped to my laptop as a drive, so when I am home, it acts just like any other drive–photoshop can see it, open files, create new files and save them there, edit existing files directly, etc.

I don’t use the NAS as a backup, but as a regular drive, those files don’t also live on the computer, they’re much too large, so I need the computer to be able to access the drive remotely or else I can’t do any work when I’m outside the house.

Is there any way to keep full read/write access to the drive when outside my home network so I can keep using it this way. I’d like photoshop to still “see” it as a location, and be able to save to it and open/edit files that are already saved there.

Thanks for your help.

2

Hi @chris_horner,

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask

3

You posted in the OS3 forum. If your device is still using OS3 then, no, there is basically no way to do this.

4

Actually; you CAN do this. . . . .by using a VPN connection to your home network.

but if you have OS/3- - - -you SHOULDN"T do this; because in 2023 OS/3 devices really need to be shielded from the internet. (My personal solution is a second router that lacks internet access - - -no I can’t access it remotely)

If you have OS/5 - - -you can risk having the NAS on a router connected to the internet. Then you can use a VPN connection (many steps here) to connect to your home network.

With my routers; the VPN’d computer gets assigned an IP in a different subnet than the rest of my network. . .so I have to address the NAS by IP address; not device name. Otherwise, it’s fine.

Note that the connection to the drive will be limited by the UPLOAD speed of the ISP. This could be QUITE limiting compared to being local to the drive. For example; at the moment I have 48Mbs down and 9.5 MBS up. (no idea what the advertised rate is). Compare this to typical 50-100 MBS transfers I see on my wired home network (They say it’s a 1GB connection; but I never see those speeds)

5

For the majority of people who have to ask, the answer is no.
Setting up remote access with OS3 is not something for the neophyte.

6

Fair.

First time setting it up can be “interesting” to say the least.

7

I may have mistakenly posted to the wrong thread then, i don’t think i’m in OS3, at least the app on my phone is OS5, the firmware on the NAS is 5.26.300 which i’m assuming is denoting OS5.

8

You are looking at the wrong solutions.

Sometimes users think NAS when they should be thinking Remote Desktop which is able to work with large files located at home in your case and the user does not need to copy large graphics files back and forth to do real work. Remote Desktop screen updates using local files are much faster than trying to sync large graphics files remotely.

There are many free Remote Desktop programs, some such as Microsoft’s own built in RDP server on Windows Pro and up. There are even ways to run RDP server on Windows Home for free if one look hard enough.

Do try to use a VPN such as the free mesh VPN provided by Tailscale (simple one program install in each PC or mac) with RDP to provide multi-factor authentication and Wireguard end to end encryption between remote and home machines.

https://tailscale.com/remote-access/