Media files need to be stored twice?

I have a My Cloud 3.0 TB. I wish to backup my computer’s data files. In addition my pictures, videos and music I not only wish to backup but also store them in the shared media area so I can stream them. The only way I can think of doing this is to back up the media files using Smartware PRO so that they’ll be backed up and separately moving my media files to the Public shared folders.

My problem with this approach is twofold. One is that I’m using twice as much disk space by storing media files twice. The second is that I need to manually move any new files to the Public shares area. Is there anyway to store the media files so that they’ll be available for streaming AND backed up automatically, preferably with all files in one location.

You do this through the Dashboard. Be sure to read all Help (?) information.

cat0w
USA

Thanks, but I’m still not there. I went through the help in the dashboard. I see how I can set up a new share but that’s not what I wish to do. My Cloud is setup with three shares; Public, SmartWare and Time Machine Backup. I see how I can control whether public access and/or media streaming is enabled for each. I’m assuming I could turn on media streaming and public access for the Public share. However I’m referring to the pre-installed Shares (Shared Music, Shared Pictures and Shared Videos).They’re not visible withing SmartWare as they’re foldres within the Pubilc share (folder). So I still don’t know how to backup to the three Shares using SmartWare.

Or am I supposed to ignore or delete the Share structure pre-installed and create three new shares at the root level for the music, pictures and videos.

I’m with you on this one. I have never used such a poorly designed interface. I work in IT and if this was put in front of me at work I would assume it was a development version. I have managed to get one step further than you and now have 3 copies of my music files on my My Cloud! All I want is for music that I download to my PC to be automatically replicated on My Cloud AND be available to other users (either on the network or remotely). I cannot find a way to make this happen.

If you want to do this in Smartware then go to the Home tab and under WD My Cloud use the drop down menu to choose Public and then under the Backup tab do a category backup and make your choices under Advanced. See image below…

You will probably want to read the Smartware User Manual and the My Cloud User Manual.

You don’t need to store media twice.

You don’t need to store media on the Public share to get it to stream; you can point Twonky to whichever share you like.

I don’t use Smartware, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t possible to tell it where to put your backups, although maybe it’s so stupid it insists on putting them in its own area…

Prior to the new forum, you could have easily found my FAQ, telling you all about how to drive Twonky. Sadly, all the hard-won sticky posts have been lost, and no-one at WD seems to have the brains to reinstate them. So here’s a link:

[edit] Hmmm… Google gave me the wrong URL.

It would be so much easier if it were sticky…

However I’m referring to the pre-installed Shares (Shared Music, Shared Pictures and Shared Videos)

My advice regarding these folders:

DO NOT USE THE ‘SHARED MEDIA’ FOLDERS TO STORE YOUR MEDIA.

Put your media somewhere else. Leave the ‘shared media’ folders for whatever it is Twonky wants to do with them.

Read my FAQ, and if you think it’s useful, pester the mods to get it made sticky again. Along the the general FAQ and the WD videos threads…

cat0w - will this put the files in the appropriate Share folders (Shared Music, Shared Videos and Shared Pictures) under Public? Or will it put everything in the Public directory - at the same level as the Shared folders?

I’ve glanced at it and it looks like it’s loaded with great info. I’ll spend some time going through and digesting everything.

THANKS!!!

One is not required to put media files in the Public Share folder. You can put those media files in any folder and so long as “Media Serving” option (via the Dashboard) is enabled for that Share it can be streamed via DLNA. Any media file in any Share, public or private, that has “Media Serving” enabled will be streamed via the WD My Cloud’s built in DLNA server (Twonky) to any DLNA client.

That said, from what I remember, no matter where one points the Smartware program to save the backed up files on the WD My Cloud drive, it will recreate/replicate the folder structure used on the computer when that content is backed up to the WD My Cloud.

I haven’t tried it since I don’t back anything up to my Public folder. What little I have there is through copy and paste or drag and drop. As stated in other replies you don’t have to have the media there for it to play. Let Twonky take care of that . See image below. To get to twonky add :9000 to the end of your My Cloud address.

This may be helpful since the change to the new forum. By clicking on a Users screen name and doing a search it will show your post. See example image of a search below.

I set it up by adding \Music, \Pictures and \Videos directories and will place all media there via Smartware. Hopefully this will have the desired effect. Fingers crossed.

This may be helpful since the change to the new forum

Thanks, but with the sluggish behaviour of the new forum, Google is quicker.

My main point is that the useful sticky posts ought to be reinstated; I know my FAQ exists, and I can find it. Others won’t know it exists, despite averaging about 500 reads a week on the old forum.

OK. I put all my music into the newly created “Music” folder (not the pre-installed “Shared Music” folder). I then ripped another CD to the library and it got backed up automatically.

So far so good. But since I used SmartWare to backup the music all my music in the new Shared directory has a directory structure of:

MUSIC → WD SmartWare.swstor → FAMILY-PC -->Volume.c0db…;.;… → Users —> Public → Music —> Artist —> Album.

Quite a bit to rummage through on the home theater receiver.

Am I doing this correctly?

Yes you are doing it correctly if using Smartware to back up your music collection. As mentioned above it is one of the downsides of using Smartware as it recreates the folder structure of your PC on your My Cloud. Which makes it tedious, when not using a DLNA client, to access that media.

There are other ways to backup one’s media to the My Cloud using 3rd party backup software or backing up just individual folder’s using third party backup software or using the WD Sync program to sync the media files.

another approach is to set up a simply batch file using xcopy and run it through task scheduler or as needed. Currently I am doing both smartware and the batch file, when space becomes an issue I will stop the smartware media backup as I would never use that structure for live data

It looks like SmartWare is creating subdirectories for each device, and each backup disk on each device, and recreating the full file structure. In which case, there doesn’t seem to be much point in trying to use individual Music, Pictures and Videos backup shares; just leave everything in the default SmartWare share, and point Twonky at the suitable point in the hierarchy.

This would be painful if you access media using the MyCloud as a file server (e.g. using SMB or NFS).
If you point Twonky at the full path, ending in your Music, Videos and Pictures folders, the views you will see from DLNA (those using logical structure (metadata), rather than physical structure (file path)) will be simpler, and will hide the full path.

Alternatively, look at SmartWare to see if there’s any way to eliminate the preamble path, and just get it to store Music under Music, etc.

My PC is ancient, and doesn’t have enough disk space to store my media collection (it has IDE disk interfaces only, no SATA…). So I use my MyCloud as my primary media store, and back it up to USB disks I connect to the PC. Like larry suggests, I use a custom xcopy script to control what I back up where. The script shuts the PC down when finished, so I often use it in place of a manual shutdown.

I have a second xcopy script to find ‘obsolete’ files (essentially, a ‘reverse’ of the first, but which merely lists changes, rather than copying anything), which I process by hand; since the PC is data master for some files, if I upload anything to my network drive, I have to update the ‘master’. I may reconsider this approach, and make the NAS master for everything…

I recently did a big backup and tidy session, and now my masters and backups are in sync.

Robocopy is a more up-to-date replacement for xcopy. It’s part of the Windows Resource Kit.

An alternative may be SyncToy, which I keep meaning to play with.

that added preamble to the path may change over time, last time I looked I had 2, could be more by now. personally I would not use smartware backups for any type of file sharing.

Ah, yes: good point; some sort of version ID. As said, I don’t use SmartWare…