Prior to July, 2023, it was a relatively simple matter of installing a Western Digital (WD) desktop utility called WD Discovery which facilitated the mounting and automatic sync of a few folders from the user’s desktop. Unfortunately, that functionality has ceased due to lack of support and resources from WD itself and if you cannot do without this functionality, you should try to return the My Cloud Home (MCH) if it is still possible to do so.
However, many ‘Home’ users do perfectly fine with alternative apps, many free, which could replicate the missing functionality and in many cases enhanced the capability of their MCH, albeit with more work on the part of the user/owner.
Here is how a home user could go about doing automatic sync in Oct, 2023:
Method 1 Google Drive or Dropbox (simpler, works remotely as is)
- Install Dropbox desktop and/or Google Drive Desktop.
- Assign folder on the desktop that would be synced by either of these apps to their respective free cloud storage.
- Sign in to the WD MCH webapp (browser) and go to My Cloud Home which controls the cloud-import for online storage such as Dropbox and Google Drive to the MCH. Enable that feature in the MCH webapp (only need to do it once). Even though both of these provide only a few GB of free storage and that little amount is limiting, it still allows much more storage to be directed to the MCH.
So this process is this, for example with Google Drive which generally syncs faster than Dropbox:
- User data on the desktop copied to the assigned folder to be synced automatically by Google Drive
- Google Drive Desktop syncs data ⇒ to the free cloud storage Google servers.
- My Cloud Home imports GD data back into the ⇒ local MCH storage area.
The limitation here is that user data must pass through Google Cloud and once the online storage is full, it must be deleted periodically. The My Cloud Home import is unidirectional so any deletions on the Google Drive will NOT cause the already imported data to be deleted.
The advantage here is however that this could access a remote My Cloud Home located away from the current subnet as is, without the use of additional software such as Tailscale or other VPN.
Method 2
Download FreeFileSync (could work with Tailscale for remote access MCH)
As the name suggests, this is free and relatively easy to use. There is plenty of online support for this, so there is really no need to go into detail on how to use it here.
FreeFilesSync does not sync over the internet as is, it requires something like Tailscale in order to work remotely.
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Download FreeFileSync 13.1 Windows |
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Download FreeFileSync 13.1 macOS |
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Download FreeFileSync 13.1 Linux |
| Download FreeFileSync 13.1 Source |
Important
Enable local access in the MCH in order for desktop sync by either Dropbox or Google Drive to access and sync from those private folders.
