I waited until there were a few firmware revisions of OS5 before taking the plunge. So I did the upgrade last Monday. Here is my personal experience and observations so far.
Indexing took a total of 8 days with my 2+ TB of data (4 drives, RAID 5).
My remaining space before the upgrade was 585 GB
My remaining space after the upgrade and indexing completed was 457 GB
Therefore, the indexing and creation of thumbnails used 128 GB!! How? What? Why?
I went ahead and deleted 85 GB of pictures/videos today and they went to the NAS recycle bin, so after doing that, the 457 GB didn’t change as expected. The dashboard didn’t say it was indexing after doing this, but it obviously was because the drives had “indexing” type activity. This lasted for about 2 hours. After the drives stopped their activity, the 457 GB went to up to 463 GB, so the removal of indexing data was a total of 6 GB. Holy c-r-a-p. I can only conclude that the indexing and thumbnails for pictures/videos has a 7% overhead. Oh jeez, that’s not efficient.
Next, are my observations with the Mobile app.
While the app might be more robust and refined than the previous OS3 app, there is one thing I wasn’t expecting. I sync my pics and vids with this app, and I’m used to opening it on demand to start a backup. In the folder it backs up to, I’m used to taking those photos and organizing them in a different folder on the NAS, then deleting the backed up items when done. The old app used to know that after it uploaded pics and vids, that was it, it wouldn’t resync them if you deleted them on the NAS. The OS5 app now knows when you delete synced pics and vids in the backup folder, and will resync those again. This is unexpected, and unwanted.
Lastly, WD needs to make an option to disallow folders from being indexed. In the above scenario, I wouldn’t allow the NAS to index the mobile phone sync backup location. Now I have duplicates and I hate that.
Well. . .if it takes EIGHT DAYS to index a mere 2TB of data. . . . .I don’t need to look at the drive space to know that something is not working efficiently.
. . . .there are only a few conclusions one can draw from how WD is responding to the indexing problems. . .and none of them are good.
Oh yeah, forgot to add the missing feature of casing in the OS5 app. It was available for years in the OS3 app and we loved to do family slideshows on the TV.
So, for some reason, my NAS has decided to do another round of indexing. WTF?
It finished indexing and was good for about 1 week, now it’s indexing again? Oh boy oh boy oh boy… way to wear out my drives
This new round of indexing is now called “Generating Previews”, instead of showing a percentage of the indexing.
I have previous cloud user accounts from OS3. I have resent an invitation to one of them and they got the e-mail, and clicked the link to make a cloud account. Now when then login they see “No associated NAS”. On other occasions when sending the invite, they get something about “Request Rejected, the device owner rejected your request”.
I’d love to delete the user and re-add, except there is no way to add a new cloud user. You are stuck with the users you had under OS3.
Add this to the list of annoyances.
My wife and I use the new My Cloud app on our phones to backup our pictures. We’ve been doing this for years with the other WD Photos app under OS3.
Now for some reason, both our My Cloud Apps have decided that they want backup all the pictures again! This time putting a _1 on the end of the file name. 15,000 pictures/video duplicated. Delete them and they come right back.
Sigh…
