During my setup of MyCloud 4T, it wants you to download a quick start program and have you map a drive. My question: Is it neccesary to install this and what does mapping a drive do with relation to MyCloud? Thanks
You donāt need the tool to map drives; it just makes it easier if you donāt know how to do it via the normal Windows interfaces.
Mapping Drives is so you can access the volumes via a drive letter instead of using URIs.
During my setup of MyCloud 4T, it wants you to download a quick start program and have you map a drive. My question: Is it neccesary to install
No, it is totally unnecessary. All the facilities of the MyCloud can be configured using the Dashboard.
WD donāt make this very clear, but see p21 āGetting Started Without the Online Setup Installerā
This refers you to p41 of the User Manual onwards: āAt a Glance: The Dashboardā.
It has recently dawned on me that the User Manual was probably written from two main parts, that were bungled together. The opening chapters, describing the Setup program, were probably written by the authors of the Setup program. The rest of the manual, from Chapter 6 onwards, were probably written by the Dashboard authors. They were then badly combined in a very poor editorial job that didnāt make it very clear that a user has two very distinct ways of configuring their device.
p10 of the manual describes basic connection, and then has this note, written in unhiglighted text:
ā3. When the LED on the front of your device turns a solid blue, continue with āGetting Started Using the Online Setup Installerā on page 11 or āGetting Started Without the Online Setup Installerā on page 21.ā
The next thing you encounter, reading the manual linearly, is a big, bold heading on p10:
" Getting Started Using the Online Setup Installer"
This guides you through the automated, download everything process, before it finally acknowledges that you can do it offline, on p21, which only does a little bit of the manual setup (mapping drives).
As you read through the manual further, it goes on about downloading yet more software to do backups of your computers. Hang on, we havenāt finished setting the thing up yetā¦
Chapter 5 adds yet more software to do āmanagementā with QuickView. Which, again, is unnecessary, since all the features are built-in to the Dashboard (powered by software ON the MyCloud).
Finally, we get to Chapter 6, which says:
āThe WD My Cloud Dashboard Home page provides a snapshot of the WD My Cloud device. You can perform the basic administrative tasks using the Home Page.ā
Actually, you can control everything about the operation of the MyCloud from the Dashboard (barring the Linux admin-style stuff we know about, but WD donāt talk about that anywhereā¦). Granted, if you want to do remote access, you need to install the relevant apps, and you might want to take advantage of SmartWare to back up your computers, but there are plenty of other ways to do that.
Thereafter, the user manual is actually quite well written, describing each of the major facilities of the MyCloud, and how to control them using the Dashboard, apart from some bizarre marketing-speak such as āMobilizing Your Files with WD My Cloud Mobile Appsā, which translates to āHow to access your MyCloud remotelyā. I prefer my manuals to be written in clear, vernacular language, not MarketingSpeak.
I recently bought a 2TB MyCloud cheaply, and did the setup manually, know that I know what Iām doing. Itās very easy; it took me about ten minutes from turning the thing on to having it configured as a network file server on my network, with all the bells and whisltes turned off so it might actually have a chance of coping when I chucked a terabyte of data at it. And that included the 5 minutes boot timeā¦
As mentioned elsewhere, this prompted me to give serious thought to an alternative setup FAQ.
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Perfect, thank you again. And Iām all for an alternative FAQ manual!
Just looked through the manual again. P50 is a good place to go for a list of āBasic Admin Tasksā, and the places to go in the manual for each of them.
Also, BC1111 posted a pretty succint setup guide, very much along the lines of what I was thinking (at least for the initial setup):
That features the same advice: turn off everything you donāt need before you try to transfer bulk data to the thing.Ā Then turn on the features you actually want.
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Thanks, I will check that out tonight. The more I use it, the more questions I have. Especially about the Share Folders. Example: how would I move something that is in Shared Music to Shared Pictures? Is it drag and drop? I know these questions might seem sinple but Iām having some issues getting pics and music into the correct folders.
Ā If youāve mapped the drive into your OS file system, then, yes, just use it like any other disk drive, with your OS file manager.
The āShared Mediaā folders, eh? They caused me no end of grief, and Iām not sure thatās where Twonky expects you to put media (regardless of what WD sayā¦). See my comments in my Twonky FAQ. You can put media WHEREVER YOU LIKEā¦ Twonky uses the āSharedā folders for media it finds in other libraries; Iām sure it is a bad idea to mix media sources like this.
Where can I find your Twonky faq? Thanks
