Managing user permissions on single folders (not shares)

Hi. Thanks to your advices in this forum, I recently bougth a MyCloud 3 TB.
I have a question related to permissions: I would like to allow a user to access only selected folders placed inside a share.
Let’s assume a MyCloud structured as follows:

  • Share1
    – Folder1
    – Folder2
    – FolderN
  • Share2
    – Folder1
    – Folder2
    – FolderM
    While WD software allow easily to allow/deny access for a selected user to the whole Share1, i haven’t found a way to allow/deny access to a specific folder.
    For example, I’d like to allow User1 to access only Folder2 inside Share1, denying the access to other folders (Folder1, Folder3…FolderN).
    I need to do so because, having a large number of folders inside every share, it would be messy to have N shares (one for every folder), as i would lose the tree structure.
    Can I obtain such result using only WD management software? Alternatively, should I use Windows permissions? In this case, would the permissions system work with users accessing from mac?
    Thanks in advance.
    Marco

If you access the My Cloud from Windows PC or Mac-PC, this is not possible by default with any kind of Network Attached Stroage out there running a Linux operating system.

Granular control over folder/directories within a My Cloud Share is not possible at this time from the My Cloud Dashboard. Subfolder and directories inherit their permissions (both for file and media access) from the root Share. The ability to control subfolders is a feature that has been requested previously in the Cloud Ideas subforum:

https://community.wd.com/t/ability-to-set-permissions-restrict-access-on-subfolders-within-shares/134942

Now, unofficially there are ways (chown command and creating/using groups for example) to potentially restrict access to subfolders and their contents. Will those methods work on the stripped down Linux OS used by the My Cloud? Unknown. It requires using SSH to access the My Cloud and execute changes to the subfolder permissions and create groups.

Edit: The following link sort of explains how to go about doing it at the command line level on Linux.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19110891/how-to-give-to-some-user-permissions-only-to-subfolder

No. Permissions are set at the share level.

No. NAS devices have their own OS, hence their own users/shares definitions. Any other OS will NOT have access to set permissions.

Now as mentioned on previous post, Even though this is a WD Device, under it, just about any NAS regardless of brand is a Linux server. So unofficially and without WD support, you could make any changes to it. Just be aware some modifications might void your warranty and could brick your device.