Hi, hoping someone can help me to figure out how to use the My Cloud Home with my PC and phone. I have so many questions so any help would be appreciated!
So far I have set it up, created an account and successfully backed up photos from my phone with the My Cloud app. I have also run a backup using my phone’s backup software which was apparently saved to “Public” folder on the MCH.
Question: Where is this “Public” folder, how do I access it, who else can access it, and can I make it private?
When I try to open the drive with my phone’s file explorer, it asks for login credentials to connect to the device. What are the credentials?
When I open the drive on my PC through windows explorer, I can only see the photos backed up with the My Cloud app, but it’s not showing me everything on the drive. The phone backup in the “Public” folder is there (I can tell my how much space is used on the drive) but I can’t see it.
And finally, how do I run a backup of my PC? When I open the WD Backup app and “Add Backup Plan”, it doesn’t find any device.
Ok so you can access the drive via windows browser, or Chrome/Firefox or whatever you use. If you know the IP address of the MCH on your network or the name of your MCH, then the credentials should be what you used when you set it up. That will bring up the web dashboard for the MCH and you can create users and shares for the drive. It most likely saved to your public folder on the MCH because you never created shares. Hope this helps a little.
@JKis717 I have created an account and so far I’m the only user. I can back up photos to my account using the MC app, but I want to do a complete backup of my phone hence I’m using another app (default Huawei backup app), but it doesn’t give me the option to save to my user profile on MCH, only a public folder which now I can’t even find.
@AustinForest I am using WD Discovery on my PC. Any other ideas?
I don’t have WD Discovery installed on my Win 10 machine and I can log into my MCH and create shares and users through the web interface in my browser. Although, I did have to enable SMB1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support for it to come up as Network Computer in explorer.
There is a YouTube video that can help you with some tips on how to see your MCH on your network. I had this issue and enabling SMB/CIFS resolved my issue. The video is less than 5 minutes and it may help you resolve your problem.
@AustinForest I use Windows. Clicking on MCH in Discovery opens Windows Explorer and displays MCH as a network drive, but I can only see the folder created by my phone gallery backup. I can’t see the phone backup which was saved to the public folder. WD Backup app still won’t detect the MCH so I can’t back up my PC.
@JKis717 Thanks for the video, if I can’t get Discovery to work I’ll try to do this. Do you use MC Home on your phone and if so can you access files (photos) from your phone on your PC without Discovery? I thought the share created by your WD account might only be accessible by logging in via a WD app…
AFAIK the mobile apps can’t see the shares created from your windows or Mac … and your Mac/pc can’t see the stuff created/added via your mobile devices and the app …
From personal experience (and on the same LAN so nothing to do with making things available remotely - nothing gets through my firewall into my home LAN quite deliberately) I could not find a way to make this work … they appear to be discrete partitions and unavailable to each type of device.
Use the Mac , create a folder on the drive under public put some stuff in it …fire up IPad and WD app and zero is visible …
I will reiterate it’s a pile of junk and they threw away all the good bits of WDCloud when they invented this ■■■■… but maybe I expect it to do too much
all i can say is using the older MC device on the mac and Ipad it works great - using this piece of technology (MCH) it doesn’t … Show me your screenshots from phone and pc? Im curious…
Jpott5, good to hear it’s working for you. I have an android and PC and as previously mentioned I can’t work out how to securely back up my phone (not just photos) or my PC as WD Backup nor Windows File History will detect my MCH. How do you do it?
@Aaron4@gkinghrn I just made sure to have all suggested apps downloaded. On my main PC I have: My Cloud Home, WD Drive Utilities, WD Backup & WD Security. I didn’t mention this before but I also have it working on my work issued iPhone (iPhone 7). On both my phones I just have the “My Cloud Home App”, First, I installed everything and created an account on my PC, then logged into the app on both phones, went to settings and turned on “Auto backup”. On the iPhone I then went to manage settings and it has you give permission for the “My Cloud Home” app to have access to whatever you want backed up. In my case I just have photos and contacts. If you have ever used OneDrive, it works very similar. I never had any issues all my photos uploaded automatically from both phones as well as any folders I created on my PC. It has been a while so I can’t recall doing anything else, but whatever I did it worked. I attached an image of the PC apps I have that the setup guide told me to download. I can do a little more digging tomorrow and see if I’m missing any steps. It has just always worked for the 4-5 months I have owned it. I have the 4TB model, it look just like the icon in the attached picture. One other thing is I hard wired my internet straight into the device, that may have a lot to do with it working. I purchased a 5 slot ethernet port and run as much as I can wired. Wired is much faster than Wifi. Let me know if this helps at all.
@gkinghrn I do have to say though. It is far from a pile of junk. I have loved it. The best part is I don’t have to pay any cloud service a yearly fee to have a measly 1TB. 4TB will go a long way for a lot of people, depending on what they are saving of course. Photos files, small videos maybe even a handful of movies. I have about 40-50 full length movies a ton of drone footage and I still have not even hit 1TB yet.
I too downloaded all the apps However I don’t use the backup stuff - that isn’t what I want (one drive functionality isn’t required in my situation).
I definitely do not want all the files on the MCH on my Mac - I use MCH as , essentially , a NAS (this is what my aging MC is). However it clearly does not have NAS type functionality in the same way as MC does.
I think in yor scenario everything is below the Mycloud folder thats created by the apps and it auto backs that lot up a la onedrive / Icloud etc … thats not the functionality I require from MCH hence why it is suitable for you and not for me .
In MC you create a share and that share is available to everyone regardless of device. By default the MCH already has a ‘public’ share but that public share is not visible to the mobile devices - they cannot see any files stored in it.
Map a network drive to your mycloudhome/public … add some files or folders … go to your various apps on your mobile devices then see if you can see them?
That’s all I did and nothing shows the files or folders. Similarly on the app on the mobile device I created a folder …that folder is not visible on the mapped drive in the folder (windows explorer to you) window.
So we have different use cases it seems which may explain why it works for you but not me.
I also do not use it in place of offsite backups and work on the basis that either the drive could fail Or my house could be lost so I continue to pay for offsite backup for my photographs etc …even if I had a 2nd device to mirror it in my house I would always have external storage… thinking this one device safeguards my data on its own is not a viable thought.
And FYI I love my MC but MCH is a very different animal it seems and for me it remains a pile of junk due it’s inherent inflexibility (being unable to allocate a static ip address in the device is also stupid and poor - having your router reserve an address for it is more complicated than it should be for most people)
I do use an online cloud, I’m just fortunate enough to have a work account that I also backup photos to. I just don’t have to pay for it, I get your point there. Rather than sharing it to your mobile device, have you just tried logging into that account from that device? Or is it for other people to use? If it is just for you, just log into it and don’t share it. I can’t answer anything about sharing, I haven’t done any of that. I have noticed in setting that there is a read/write and just read option on folders or the whole account. Have you turned on read/write? Probably a stupid question, just trying to figure out why that wouldn’t work. I’ve done that with OneDrive and it works great. I know they are different clouds entirely, but I’ve noticed a lot of the functionality is similar.
