In the iPhone MyCloud app, I am able to turn on auto-backup for new photos/videos. But how do I backup the ones already on my phone? The app does not pick up older files.
I recently and successfully uploaded ALL photos and videos from mine and my wife’s iDevices. to my WD My Cloud NAS using the iOS My Cloud app on our phones and Pads.
First, I made folders for us on the NAS in the default Shared Pictures folder – one for my stuff and one for her’s. In each of our folders I made four others, and named them for our iPhone photos, videos, and two others for each of our iPad photos and videos.
Now that you have your empty folders set up, you use the My Cloud app to do the work, so let’s go through an example of uploading my iPhone Camera Roll. (You do not find the separate photos and videos to upload; you upload the whole Camera Roll into one folder and when it is all there you use Windows File Explorer to look into the folder and sort files by “Type” of file, I uploaded into the empty Photos folder, and selected out the MOV files and cut and pasted them into the empty Videos folder. Now photos and videos are separated.
So, to continue how to upload, in app, go to the empty folder you will upload into. Look on top right of phone screen and see three dots. It is a menu, so tap it and select “add photo” and you will see Camera Roll of phone. Tap it, and then tap “Select all”. Once they all have a check in the thumbnails, tap the Upload icon at the bottom right of screen, and off they go. Be sure you have a good charge on phone beforehand.
IMPORTANT: The My Cloud app has a MAJOR PROBLEM with the iDevice Auto-Lock feature (if the timer of Auto-Lock is too short and the upload process did not finish by time Auto-Lock kicks in, all of Camera Roll is not uploaded. You HAVE to set the Auto-Lock setting beforehand in phone and Pad to NEVER, so the process does not time out. Afterward, you can/should reset Auto-Lock to a reasonable value again. Forget to do this, and you will have to delete what got uploaded to My Cloud device and begin again. Once you complete this large data-dump, you may not need to set Auto-Lock to NEVER again, I have both my phone and Pad set to 5 minutes normally. Auto-Lock is in General Settings of iDevice.
OK, repeat process for other folders you will upload into.
Once all the files are uploaded, you can easily access them for viewing with the My Cloud app.
Good luck, and don’t forget about setting to Never, like I did, and have to start over!
