Well, the day finally arrived where I’m locked out from uploading or maintaining my MCM gen1 until I upgrade from OS 3 to OS 5. Given the experiences that most everyone has had with OS 5, I’m definitely not going to do that and plan on getting another NAS. This thing has been a nightmare from the start anyway and has soured me to the point where I don’t plan on ever purchasing a WD product again, even hard drives.
My question is, how easy/difficult is it to migrate over to another brand NAS? Whether it’s Synology or one I’d build myself and throw FreeNAS (or whatever it’s called now) onto? Will another NAS try and format my hard drives when I move them over from the WD My Cloud? Does WD format their drives in some funky, proprietary way so other brands won’t recognize them? (Hope not but at this point nothing would surprise me).
I’m running a RAID 1 btw. Any advice or FAQs, or guides you can link me to moving my two mirrored drives to another NAS while preserving the data would be very helpful, thanks!
Also, what would be the fastest, easiest way to back up the data I have on these drives now. Since I have the drives mirrored, would all I have to do is buy another, third 4TB drive like the others, remove one, drop the blank one in the slot and would the NAS automatically have the full drive copy over?
Building my own would be one option, but I was more asking about moving over to another should I choose not to and just buy something pre-built. And yes, I had asked before but decided to stick with the device as an update after my post improved it somewhat. Things have changed yet again.
I was not able to log into files/mycloud through the web browser to manage my files. I did a 4 second reset and that seems to be working. Now my problem is I am unable to get the device to recognize any external USB drives I want to make backups to.
Both drives NTFS, the large one I’m trying to backup to says unsupported file structure and gives a red light on the device, the other doesn’t cause a flashing light and still isn’t recognized by the NAS.
The larger drive that won’t connect and gives the red light was the one that housed my data originally that I moved to the My Cloud Mirror when I first bought it, so it used to work at one point many moons ago heh.
I guess another option to make a backup is, buy another HDD of equal size to what’s in my NAS (4 TB), replace one of the drives in the NAS with the new blank one, and enable auto rebuild in the settings? The 3 TB external I’m trying to backup to seems like it’s two drives in the enclosure partitioned as one drive so ripping them out of the enclosure and popping either into my NAS isn’t gonna work, even if it was just one 3 TB drive in there and has enough room to backup to, it’s not 4 TB like what’s in my NAS
Whenever I have weirdo problems. . . .try a hard reboot (i.e. hibernate). Twice.
Is the external drive readable by a PC?
NTFS drives should work. . . however what I have seen with OS3 is that with “cloud access enabled”; the stupid OS will attempt to index or somehow “process” any new external drive before you actually can access it. That’s fine for a 256gb USB key. It is NOT fine for a 3TB HDD. (This is ONE Thing they got right in OS5. . . they made the default “no cloud access”)
Don’t insert any drive with data on it into the NAS. . .the NAS will always default to try and overwrite/reformat
You want an “offline” backup. You really do. Worst case - - hook and external to you PC and execute a drag and drop using file explorer. (This requires PC to be on for the entire excercise)
I had cloud access disabled and enabled it this morning thinking it would change anything; it didn’t
Thanks, good to know. So if I got my hands on a blank 4T drive and just swapped out one of the full drives, that should be an easy, automatic way to clone a third copy of my data that I can then remove and use in an external enclosure, or whatever? I mean, that’s the whole point of RAID 1 so of course, but, just wondering if there’s any caveats I should know before trying that.
Yah worst case definitely as that will take forever heh. Looks like I may need to prepare for that.
. . .so. . . .technically. . . .hot swapping drives and doing rebuilds should work. I am a bit leery of that method. . . But I am a paranoid in that regard. . . so I rely on external drives for backup.
Same here heh. Sad that I’m having trouble making a backup of a device that I bought …to make backups
Anyway, since the 4 second reboot enabled me to at least get back into and manage my device, I don’t have such a burning desire to move to something else, but I really would like to get this bad boy backed up so I’m ready for if/when that day does come.
Meh, just bit the bullet and made a backup through wifi file transfer to my laptop with that USB drive connected heh. It’s taking forever but will take less time than continuing to troubleshoot.
Well I’m eating a little crow right now. Upgraded to OS 5 and it’s actually not bad. I guess whatever kinks were there mainly got worked out after subsequent patches. I miss having the little system tray icon that uploads files to the device for me, as I don’t like giving the user account I use to access my files through Windows Explorer write permission which is what I need to do now to upload entire folders of docs, but, minor quibble I guess. Otherwise, so far so good.
