I think w11 24H2 finally ruined my network drive? how to transfer files?

Legacy Products My Cloud OS 3
1

My Cloud (the white, 3TB no longer supported firmware, taken offline) network drive is no longer listing as seen drives under “This PC” devices & drives.

Under Network locations the WDMyCloud is listed and Aronis True Image is still happily backing up each day to it. (The SMB1 boxes are all ticked and have been since I first got a w11 machine 4 months ago and found out about the SMB1 problems)

But a few weeks ago when the latest Windows 11 update installed I lost the ability to use file explorer to see 3 folders in my network drive called “photos” “music” and “videos” making it impossible to just go into, say the photo folder, see all the folders in there (which happen to be folders I backed up to DVDr when the pc folder got to 4GB and I moved it over and started a new one on the PC). So I can’t just use file explorer to find a file.

Media Player still lists all my music, and I can still play a song where the file is only in the network drive… and WOW I just managed to map the drive using map a drive and using a shorter tree than the entire song was listed as under properties… the only other listing remaining was the quickaccess “music” that was pinned to the mycloud but would not open in the right format (it was impossibly slow and only showed “music” as a list of all files not the folders they were saved in under the music folder)

But it’s also now showing as 99gb free and a red line (it was 1 tb free last month)…

So as it’s difficult keeping this attached

  1. how can I see what it is that is filling my network drive up as WDMyCloud UI says 2.4TB is basically “Other” in the pie chart (600GB is split over music, photos & video)
  2. Are network drives “finished” under Windows 11 for home set ups?
  3. Am I best off with a new Desktop 4TB+ external drive and if using one of those via USB would the Acronis backup software and my music library via media player for everything stored on it work the same or better?
  4. best way to transfer the photo/music/video files (not pc back ups) from the old network drive to a new network drive or external desktop drive?

I used to know the answers to questions like this but Window11 is a pig for casual home users to know what it is doing behind it’s UI and WD Network drives seem to be unsupported as a “thing” for home users…

Thanks in advance

2

Using the address tree from a music file via media player and putting a cut down version of that into file explorer… I have found Acronis has created in “Timemachine” folder “older” two date ranges 3 and 4 months ago totalling 240gb, “this month” being Nov and 440gb and recent, which is basically last week of 357gb.

This is weird… my old backups of my previous pc seem to be in the smartware folder ? and there cant be more than 40gb of stuff on my pc (as it also backsup to norton and onedrive and neither are showing this kind of storage use - and norton clearly doesn’t offer that size!)

Ive initiated “clean up” but it seems Arconis is drowning the drive… and W11 is making it hard to access manually!

3

The address I use in File Explorer is \\WDMYCLOUD. This is my old single bay OS3 device.

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I do have a shortcut in File Explorer under Quick Access. See image below. Click on, tap, or activate image to enlarge it.

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It shows under Network after I open the device.
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I have Windows 11 Pro 24H2 with all updates.

4

In addition to SMB 1, you may need to disable SMB Signing, enable Guest Fallback, or both.

I’m still on 23H2 but have test 24H2 in a virtual machine and works fine with my EX$ and even older ReadyNAS Duo.

5

If you are having issues with Windows 11 24H2, see the following two links for suggested workarounds to the issues Microsoft introduced when releasing 24H2.

https://winaero.com/windows-11-24h2-significantly-slows-down-smb-data-transfer-speed/

If one uses the forum search feature, magnifying glass icon top right, and searches this subforum for 24H2, they’d find a number of past posts with people having similar problems with Windows 11 24H2. With suggested workarounds they were able to fix their issue(s).