Link two My Cloud units

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

Hi,

I have a WD My Cloud with 2TB disk.
Now it alerts that space is getting low.

I’ve seen that I can attach a USB external drive and use that for extra storage.
But I’d like to know if it is possible to buy one more WD My Cloud with maybe even more storage and then link them together? Like one is Master and one is Slave?

Thanks for any support in this matter!

~AndieB

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You can add a second My Cloud and use it for backup of the first My Cloud.

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(whisper whisper)

(If you abuse some form of user-mode init script, you can mount any number of remote network filesystems (in nfs) in the mycloud’s filesystem, which it would then be more than happy to make available over SMB… This is of course, less than desirable for a number of reasons. [poor latency, excessive network traffic generation, potential issues with sessions becoming dirty, and a number of others] That does not mean it is impossible though. Just, you really dont want to do it, even if you think you do. It might make sense to do that if the MyCloud had more than one ethernet interface, and you could segregate traffic, but the mycloud lacks such a feature. It is meant for home environments, not building a poor man’s SAN.)

Really, you just want to put some additional space available using USB hard disks in the case of the mycloud, like RAC8006 suggests.

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Officially the single bay My Cloud units can only be connected via networking/Ethernet not by connecting them together using USB. If one want’s to expand the storage of their My Cloud they can attach an external USB hard drive to the USB port on the My Cloud.

If one decided to add a second My Cloud unit to the local network it will be seen as a second network attached storage device. Officially the second generation My Cloud units do not support backing up using the My Cloud Dashboard Backup feature to another single bay My Cloud unit.

As the previous poster indicated it may be possible to mount a second My Cloud drive with the first one but this involves using SSH and possibly modifying the My Cloud firmware so one drive gets mounted by the other.

Another option is to buy a “diskless” multi bay NAS enclosure and install the existing My Cloud hard drive (once removed from it’s single bay enclosure) and another SATA desktop hard drive to create a RAID array with both drives… Doing this however generally means erasing the hard drives so one would want to backup any existing data before installing the hard drives into a multi bay NAS enclosure.

Edit to add: And one further option is to buy a bigger hard drive and replace the existing hard drive in the My Cloud enclosure. Some of us have done this as a way of increasing the size of our existing single bay My Cloud unit. Use the forum search feature (magnifying glass icon upper right) and search for :“unbrick” to find past discussion on how to replace the My Cloud hard drive. Note one would need to know their single bay My Cloud version (and firmware) since the methods to unbrick the second generation v2.x single bay My Cloud are different than unbricking a first gen v3.x/v4.x single bay My Cloud.

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Thank you Bennor for a very good response!
I am thinking that I will maybe have to either buy a new WD Cloud unit with much more storage and that supports Remote Backup OR purchase an external disk and connect it via the USB.

Again thank you and also thank you rac8006 and Wierd_w for contributing with answers.

~AndieB