When I first installed the WDMC I did not install or use any software other than the browser interface that is built into the hardware. It was easy to set up and works OK. I can transfer files via Windows. But, such transfer is slow, good enough for individual file sharing and incremental backups, but for an initial transfer of gigabytes of small files I am looking for alternatives.
Rumor had it that copying from a directly attached USB drive, using the MyCloud app, may be faster. My actual experience shows that this app is useless for the purpose. One fatal flaw is that the files’ date stamps are lost. Also the UI is terrible and erratic. More details below.
I have tried using the MyCloud app for Windows. The user interface is simple - but TOO simple, and buggy:
* looks a bit like Windows File Explorer, but folders only show up in the left
side navigation panel. Only files, not folders, are listed on the right.
* Dragging something to COPY it (between USB drive and internal drive, for example), the cursor gets a “+” added to it, which in Windows means it will copy rather than move, but what this app actually did was move the file or folder. Not what I wanted.
* Tried to move or copy FOLDERS by dragging them within the left panel. The results were erratic: sometimes it affected the parent folder along with the child folder that I dragged. And sometimes it moved a different folder from the one I dragged. This happened several times, so it’s not just that my fingers stumbled once. The net result after several tries was a total mess that I could only fix via Windows, outside the app.
* Copying of a large number of small files from PC to WDMC using this app was VERY slow. About one second per file, no matter how small.
* Some large files failed to copy for no apparent reason. They were listed in an error report panel, but only the file names, not their locations (although their pathname appears if you hover the mouse over an entry in the list). These files copied perfectly well via Windows.
* The files copied via the app lost their Windows date stamp: on the WDMC the date stamp was set to the copy date (both the “created” and “modified” dates, as it appears in Windows). This is a loss of important metadata. When copying files via Windows the “date modified” is preserved and the “date created” is set to same as “date modified”.
If a file on the WDMC is modified in place then both dates get updated. In the MyCloud app only the “date modified” appears. Presumably the file system on the WDMC only keeps one date stamp for a file? Even so, the app could have been designed to preserve one of the Windows dates when copying files from Windows.
* Even when transfering from USB drive attached to the WDMC, the date stamps are lost. Thus it’s useless to me.
* To copy or move a folder, since it does not show up in the right pane, I had to drag it within the left pane (folder tree). But if I needed to drag it to a folder that is past the visible part of the list, there was no way to get there. The list did not scroll when the mouse cursor reached its edge, as happens in Windows. And while files in the right pane have a right-click pop-up menu which includes “copy” (but not “select all”), folders in the left pane do not. So the operation was impossible.
In summary, this app is a sad joke as a file manager. WD needs to rewrite it from scratch. Fortunately one can use the Windows File Explorer to do the needed file management. Unfortunately copying from a USB drive directly attached to the WDMC, to the WDMC internal drive (or vice versa), then involves a round trip through the network and the PC, resulting in slow transfers. Also, presumably one has to use this app when accessing the MyCloud remotely, from a PC that is not on the same local network? If so, it might be useful for individual file access, but totally useless for folder operations.
