I’m advising a family with MyBookLive NAS + two Win 10 Home laptops.
Personally I haven’t dealt with NAS in a home network before but I claim to be reasonably IT aware.
My strategy is to use MBL purely as local storage for use by Win 10 backup and recovery utilities.
I’m not planning to use any WD supplied software such as came with the box.
Q1:
I’d like to be aware of any file system limits that might exist on the NAS
e.g. FAT 32 under Windows has a file size limit of 4GB.
The proposed backup strategy can create quite large files ~100GB or more.
Will the combination of systems cope OK?
(No point in using the cloud for them; they don’t have the web bandwidth, and in any case, they own the MBL)
Do I need to worry myself at all about the file system MBL actually uses?
Q2:
A very similar question.
I’m also recommending they configure Win 10 File History to back up to the MBL
any files which changed in the last few hours
FH can create quite long path names, and I am aware that data on one of the laptops is already close to the Windows 255 byte limit for a fully qualified file name.
and that’s WITHOUT counting the 29 bytes of timestamp info which FH adds to every file name.
I have a plan on how to deal with these long file names, but I want to predict the scale of changes the user will need to make - the number & location of critical files.
So is there a max length, and what is it in bytes?
I believe MBL uses a unix OS internally(??), so I’m hoping there is a sporting chance my plans are OK.
With luck the gurus here will tell me all clear on both of these two issues.
Final Q3:
Reading the WD KBs about Win 10 access issues (20736, 20776 and 26161) I’ve understood you can use MBL in a Win 10 home network, without incurring too many security risks.
Is that the received wisdom here?
Do you have any words of advice before I start on tweaking Win 10 to let MBL in?
Q1. I believe the mybooklive uses EXT3 or EXT4, so file sizes under 1TB shouldn’t be an issue.
Q2.The mybooklive will have that same byte limit.
Q3. I don’t think you’ll need to enable SMB1.0 for the Mybooklive to work, though lately I’ve noticed file sharing on windows 10 is a huge pain for users who’ve called in at my job. Just make sure the drives have a static IP reserved on the network.
Thanks for a really helpful reply - esp the not so obvious Path length consideration
I hope others see our exchange and benefit
It’s all you need to know before you start - (I think!)
I’ve been using Windows 10 on 3 computers sharing access to a MyBookLive NAS (and a MyCloud NAS).
SMB1.0 is not needed. Some forms of network discovery don’t work without SMB1 but that does not get in the way of accessing MBL from Windows.
A static IP address is not needed. If the computer and NAS are on the same LAN segment (which can include wireless connections) you can use the NAS “Device Name” - its DNS name.
Setting up NAS access on Windows 10 is different from previous releases but there are many web sites giving good descriptions. I probably don’t remember all the steps but some are
Turn on Network Discovery and device sharing
Make the computer discoverable … and remember the Windows will reset this if you change routers.
Turn on NetBIOS over TCP … and remember that the automatic default is to disable this if you give Windows a static IP address (among other undocumented reasons).
@pokeefe That’s also very helpful advice.
I’ve already found that \DeviceName works fine and correctly translates that into IP address.
Your point 3 Turn on NetBIOS (WD Answer ID 18018) may well be why PC1, re-installed Win 10) sees the network, yet PC2 (Win 10 upgrade from Win8) does not.
Thank you.
Surely point 3 and cleaning out old authentication details will sort things out…
In hope
spilly
