Public > Public > Public > Public

Just browsing my cloud and noticed the public share had 216GB.I looked into it and noticed the Public folder had the same structure and its content in a sub folder called public. This sub Public folder had the same structure as above… repeat repeat repeat!!! See attached screenshot. I stopped clicking to get further down the tree, so not really sure how far it goes!

Sound familiar…?

1 Like

Sure does.

Hi Diesel9a1 - this behaviour is the result of a symbolic link in the file system on the WDMycloud.

Apologies if you know this already - a symbolic link is a bit like a shortcut in windows and in my case the link called ‘Public’ in the Public directory pointed back to the same directory it was in so if you follow it you come back to where you started and you could follow it again - Ad infinitum.

A windows shortcut set up like this will not keep extending the tree but obviously it sees a symbolic link through samba as a directory with confusing results. In Unix a symbolic link does at least look different but will keep extending the tree if set up like this.

Anyway, WD support could not or did not want to understand the problem so I gave up and just deleted the link via ssh. No files were lost and everything seems to be working. I don’t know how a delete from within windows would be handled.

I also don’t know how it got there in the first place, I’d only installed and used the standard WD utilities and I certainly didn’t create it manually.

Hope that helps - Let me know if you need any help with the Linux side of things

Interesting. I just checked my Public share and I don’t have that symlink. I also only have the 3 shared sub-folders.

I have a gen 1

The link expands the navigation tree on the left hand side, so it isn’t as if it simply opens a new window the same as a shortcut would. Not fully understanding symbolic link, but if this was a shortcut, then I would expect a new browser window to open up.

Have you tried logging in via SSH and having a look around?

cd /shares/Public
ls -la

Look for an entry called Public, with an l (for link) at the front of the access status; something like:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 <date> Public

As explained in the thread link I posted earlier, you can delete this symbolic link (stay in the same directory, i.e. /shares/Public):

rm Public

A symbolic link is a Unix file system object whose most similar Windows equivalent is a shortcut - but they are not the same thing and don’t have exactly the same behaviour. The complication is that the MyCloud is allowing you to interact with a Unix file system using a Windows interface. Most of the time that’s fine as files and directories work in the same way but a symbolic link is subtlety different and for whatever reason it is represented in Windows as a directory - which is confusing.

As I said it seems safe to delete the link, though I would suggest doing it through ssh as cpt_paranoia has described.