Hi, so I have an issue with my My cloud home device. A user on my device is unable to access his email account due to it being deactivated by internet provider (purged). He has his login information for my cloud home but when he goes to login, it wants to send the “verify identity” authentication code to his email, which he is unable to get to. We need to update his email address.
The content on his my cloud home account is important that we need to get to.
I’ve contacted all types of support for days trying to get WD to figure this out. As his admin, I can see him as a user but can’t update his email address. Any ideas?
Side bar: We use Windows Website Login (windows 11), and I have IOS app and he has the Android app.
A WD account is usually based on some kind of established account such as Google or Microsoft and there is no method of recovery for the WD account if the corresponding established account is lost, as far as I can tell. This is because WD does not ask for additional user identity beyond a verifiable email address.
I would suggest your guest user try to recover his lost email with his ISP.
You have not given the reader the detail of their reply and it is likely that WD was unable to help.
How would you suggest WD support verify the identity of your guest user? Or should WD just give anyone who contacted them about a lost credential a free pass at any WD user data?
Any guest user or owner of a My Cloud Home is responsible for the backup of their own data. The common 3, 2, 1 rule for backup is in effect: 3 copies of important data in separate devices, 2 copies onsite and 1 offsite.
Thank you for your reply. I understand privacy and all that. I thought admin meant you could override the other users somehow. Otherwise, what’s the point of the so called “admin” if you can’t use control. Apparently, the other app my cloud with OS has it’s own dashboard to edit user’s information. But not my cloud home?? ridiculous!
The account in question is my husband’s and I’m the admin that setup the device. The whole thing started with the authentication being in the way. he has his login information, so if they didn’t send the authentication to “verify” then we wouldn’t have any problems. I never get the authentication emails, so that is a little odd.
But what gets me is that WD can’t find a way to update his email address in their systems or let me as an admin update my own users. Their customer service support do not have a clue how to help customers.
the ISP have already been contacted and unfortunately, the email account was purged due to a small amount of time of inactivity and cannot be resurrected. So that is no longer an option.
My only other option to try is to demote me via pin reset and see if his user account gets reset when it transfers over to admin owner. I may not be able to get in, I have backed up my portion of the device just incase and if nothing else I will have to see if geek squad can recover his portion of the device. here’s to hope!
You are correct in that other WD OSes have different dashboards, those are the OS3 and OS5.
By design, WD decided to limit the administrative rights in the My Cloud Home’s OS4 system so that there is no root access by anyone, owner or user, on the OS4 device. This allowed certain level of privacy and security which is higher than the ones on OS3 for example which was hacked when WD allowed too much access to OS3.
There shouldn’t be any problem changing the user’s email address as long as users could log into the webapp with the current credential.
If there is anything to be learned from this is that
Do not use ISP email addresses for credentials
Do follow up on credential verification even if some steps appeared to be missing. There are many reasons for missing verification such as typos or spam folders or rejection of some class of email addresses by authentication servers. If you don’t follow up, there is a good chance it will not work in the future.
Do make as many backups as possible for data that are important to you.
