Q. About Sharing and data protection

New to MyCloud…  I am trying to set it up so my husband and I plus my son & daughter-in-law can use it… With my son and his wife, I want them to feel confident my husband and I can’t get into their data…

Last Night, I fell upon the Sharing and turned sharing off… Then did fine that it turned sharing off for everyone so for each person I did turn on that there data can be shared with themselves (have a feeling if I hadn’t, no one could access anything)… At the time, not too thrilled at that protection as it seemed I could just go to the sharing list and turn sharing on if I wanted to be snoopy and get into other peoples private stuff.

Today though… Sharing has no one on the list at all to manage accounts for, not even my own folder…  This might be good for what I initially wanted… But, now if I wanted to turn on sharing between my husband and my own folders… Or if my son and his wife want to share their folders, is there anyway for them to control their own sharing and change this?

Today I also came across the fact that under the user tab I can turn passwords on (currently all are off)… I personnally hate typing passwords for everything I do… But I am wondering if this was more what I was suppose to use to protect everyones personal data… I don’t want to play with it in case like sharing if I turn the password on, the user will vanish from my list to manage and I can’t turn the password off.

If you have been updating the list of users, there is a chance you erased a user without wanting to. Sometimes, the UI is very unresponsive.

What you can do to reset users, is go to the settings, utilities and do a system only factory restore. This will leave your content intact, but will reset all your users. You will be left with a default admin account with a blank password.

You can then recreate your users, your passwords and create the desired access rights for each share.

I advive you put passwords on the user accounts.

One caveat, for one windows user on a PC, you can only use one set of NAS credentials to access the NAS. This is typically not a problem when families set a user for each individual on a PC, but if the family share the sames windows account, it will be very hard to user different NAS users.

Sounds like you think I should always see the list of users regardless of if I turned off sharing or not…

Before I do this reset thing, which I kindof fear if I don’t completly understand, I could lock myself out entirely… I have a few questions…

Can I erase the list only for the sharing area, while all the users are still listed in the user area and all the users still have their accounts and can access them from their laptops.

On the bottom of the “Home” tab, It shows a square with “users   4”  and “shares (nothing)”  both with plus signs…  Can I add those in the user list to the shares list this way? or does this just allow anyone who is not a current user access to the data without creating and account for them and then would that data just be the folders that are shared, but not in the sharing area list like public, smartware and timemachinebackup.

By the way I know what public is, but was is the smartware and timemachinebackup to be used for? We do want to backup our laptops would 4 laptops all be backed up to the timemachinebackup rather then to our own personal folders?

the shareing option is to stream media files to DLNA devices and there is no user controls for this.

user files are only private to a degree, the admin user can always get to them

Another question… We have not loaded much into our personal areas, I have spent time moving photos, videos and music to the public area, but that is it…  Could I just delete all users and then readd all users and they will be readded with share turned on again so that I can then change sharing to share between husbands & wifes not just themselves?

So how can I as admin get back in to play with the users sharing when they no longer show up on the list?..  Right now it seems like it locked me out as admin when I turned off sharing, and those folders for the other users vanished out of the WDmycloud list  from this program I only see public, smartware, timemachinebackup and my own personal folder…  Before I turned off sharing everyones folder showed up and I could access through the WDmycloud program…

In the long run this seems to be doing exactly what I had hoped… So goody…  I just would like a chance to set up sharing the way everyone would like it before it locks me out as admin…

What are you using to see the shares? try from Windows file explorer and either wd2go.com or a mobil app

let me know is you see the same shares in both

Can you clarify what you mean when you say “I turned sharing off?”

Also, when you say “I see the list of users”, what are you looking at?

Do you access the shares through the WD Apps (like WD MyCloud)?  Or on your network through Windows Explorer?

As Larryg0 has noted, if you have turned on Media Sharing, and you are looking at the DLNA server (The WDMyCloud icon that shows in This PC, for example), this shows always all the media content (pictures, movies, music) for any share that has Media Sharing turned on in the NAS UI, regardless of the access rights (Read/Write, Read only, or no access) of each user set up in the NAS UI. In other words, media sharing doesn’t respect the access rights for file sharing.

In the MyCloud Dashboard (so WD Apps)  along the top you have tabs   “Home”, “Users”, “Shares”,“Cloud Access”, “Safepoints” and “Settings”…

2 days ago I went into the “Shares” tab, and all the users were listed… Can’t remember exactly, because I saw it this once, worked with it and now I can’t see this info anymore…   But… on the list to the left were all 4 users. I would click on one, it showed something like “Shared” with an on/off button… Button was set to “On”… I turned it off…  I did this for all 4 users… The list remained intact not removing users as I made changes… Somewhere around the last user, I noticed below the “shared” on/off button was with each user a list of the 4 users, each had a shared On/off next to their name… All users were now set to “Off” (not sure if it was always this way, or clicking the master “shared” button turned them all off… So I again clicked on all 4 users and turned the individual user share button to “On” for the individual user who that account belonged to…   I then left and went to bed…

Next morning got up to play some more and found that in the “shared” Tab the list on the left hand side is totally empty… So no users to click on anymore, I can no longer make any changes to anyone’s share setup…

But if I go to the tab “Users”  I have listed all 4 users  If I click on a user there I get anothe toggle switch that has password turned off but will allow me to turn password on… (I am leaving that alone for now)…

If I go to the tab “Home”  I have bottom middle 2 boxes one box reads “Users  4”  another box reads "Shared " (thats it not 4 not even 0 just no number next to it at all.

Not sure what DLNA server is (sorry)…  I currently most the time adding and reading stuff from the WDMyCloud area through the software provided for the product… In there currently on the left hand side I have listed “Public”, “SmartWare”, TimeMachineBackup, and my own personal folder (not the other users folders, which is good)…

I do see on my explorer under my :“network”, and “thisPc” reference for “MyCloud” but when I click on it, I am shown 3 folders “Music”, “Photos”, “Videos”… All folders are empty…  Since this is not the folders or files in my personal mycloud folder nor in the public mycloud folder, I have done little with that but scratch my head wondering what in the world this is pointing to…  I would prefer accessing mycloud stuff using explorer, but not if I cannot figure out where this area is in relationship to the other “MyCloud” areas…

larryg0  I am on a pc not a moble app…  Where would I get the wd2go.com?.. Doesn’t seem to be one of the program software they loaded on my pc when I took on the administrator role.

OK.

In the users tab, you have the list of users. When you select each user, you see the shares they have access to and which type of access they have (read/write, read only, or no access)

In the shares tab, you ahve a list of shares. When you create a user, the NAS is adding a share that has the name of that user. You can create other shares. When you click on a share there, you see the different users below. If the share is “public”, all users have access, and the list of users is greyed out below on the right. If you want selective access for each user, turn off public access for that share. The list of users won’t be greyed out any longer for that share, and then you can selectively change the access rights.

You have found the DLNA server showing the Photos, videos, etc. If on a given share, media sharing is on, the DLNA server will show the media (not documents) in that share, regardless of the user access rights described above.

wd2go.com is a web site that you can use to access the my cloud remotely, you need to setup remote access and assign an email to an account then follow the instructions in the email to setup a WD account

different access methodes use different configurations on the mycloud so it helps identifying the issue.

have you rebooted? if not try it from the UI

to avoid confussion please be carefull with the terms, when you are on the shares tab you are looking at shares, not users. if you select a share you will see a list of users below the shares and you can select full, read only or no access for each user. In the user tab you will see a list of users and ir you select a user you will see a list of shares and can set access for the current user on any shares listed

Etupes - I think we are getting close to understanding each other… Under the user tab, when I click on anyone in that list it has the “User Profile” listing username f/l name, email and the toggle for password… Under that is a header called “Share Access”  this is empty for each of the 4 users.

Under the Shares  I have no one on the list of Shares, so no one is in the list of shares…  Right after I created the users I did have 4 in my list of Shares, when I clicked on someone in my list of share I had what you said,  But I changed the toggle that made all users on my list of share so they were not public, and with the list of users under each share (where you can give no access, read or full) I only set each for full access for the user the share belonged to…

I wish we could send a photo… From what you say, sounds like I should still have my 4 people in my list of shares regardless of the fact they are now set to not be public that way I could still click on them and change a user that is given no access to have read or full access… But, nope… Don’t have anyone in my list of shares… My share list is empty…  So I can’t change anyone back to public, nor can I change who it is they want to share with other then what I did in my original setup…

larryg0  - I tried the reboot, didn’t help…  I went to the wd2go site… It didn’t know me, do I need to do something through the dashboard that would allow the wd2go site the ability to recognize me?

Thanks

OK, it looks like you have lost the default shares created for each user, for some obscure reason. Maybe you deleted some shares, and you repeated the operation because the UI was not refreshing and you ended up deleting all shares :-) 

Doesn’t matter!

Do a system only factory restore. This will delete all users, recreate the default Smartware and TimeMachineBackup shares and leave any existing valid share intact.

Then recreate your users. The corresponding user share should be created as well. Then change the access rights for the share as you wish, then copy the content there.

Don’t forget about doing a backup of your NAS content. You could consider running a Safepoint to a USB disk you attach to the back of the NAS. This will do a flat copy across the shares of the files into a single directory on the USB disk, as a mirror. You cannot select what to backup, Everything is backedi up. It doesn’t keep deleted files, or versions either. When and if you disconnect the USB disk, first eject it from the NAS UI.

Yeah, something went wrong, but I am pretty sure I didn’t delete anything…  All I played with were the toggle switches to make them public and set up who could share… As I said, that night after the process all was in the shared list, left the program for the evening, next morning when I got it nothing was in the share list.

If the factory reset just deletes the 4 users then I don’t think any of us have put much into our personal accounts… But I have moved ALOT to the public area, that took hours to move as that computer was old and just became the storage computer… We are totally replacing with the wdMyCloud but it was used for large data store of all photos, videos & music. For some reason the computer wouldn’t install the mycloud software. I had to pull it off by a thumbdrive (several times as it would max out in storage), then push it to the wdmycloud using my laptop… Moving from old computer to thumbdrive was like 30 minutes each time and then from thumbdrive to wdmycloud was 2hours 30 minutes each time…  So I don’t want to loose the info from the public file folders…

If the content is in the Public share, you won’t lose it with the system only reset. If the content was in a share that disappeared, then I don’t know how to retrieve it. I am not sure you can, also it might just be a UI or configuration issue some Linux admin can solve for you.

Remember that this NAS has only one disk. If the disk dies, you will need a backup. Even if the NAS had 2 disks in RAID 1 you would still need a backup…

OK, this morning I woke up to things worse (I didn’t do the factory reset yet, I did nothing yesterday to cause this) now I can’t get into the dashboard, I get a “This page can’t be displayed error”… I also can’t get into the “my cloud” I get “can’t connect to this device” error…  I had read yesterday on the forum a comment about the servers being down in the past, and people not getting into their mycloud, I thought perhaps this was the case, but I am sure if that was the case it would be a hot topic, I see nothing on it… So just me.

I was getting some other weird things though yesterday that made me think it may be a problem with a corrupt program. I went into settings and tried to change the time to eastern standard time… It just sat with “update” on it for 30 minutes, I finally just exited out… I tried updating something else in settings (forget what) again it just hung with “update”… 

I did see someone commenting on a way to downgrade as the new upgrade they are having trouble with… I did do an upgrade on the first day… Perhaps this is what is causing my problems… Don’t know if I can downgrade with the tangled mess I now have…

Luckily we haven’t taken our old computer off-line yet… I am thinking I need to rip out (if possible) and reinstall… Is there any step by step help guide for a total reinstall ?

I noticed the “MyCloud” software first page showed it found the WDMyCloud as a connected device, but it also used to show it as found on the network, it is no longer found on the network.

I thought it might be best at this point to ask for support from the WDmycould CustomerSupport… I am probably getting so messed up, I think it has escalated that far…

So new question anyway to contact them besides the WD Support Port ??  The registration is being a real  (insert swear word here)…   I have tried different passwords, definately with number & charactors and 8 or more charactors in length…  I reset the capitcha to words not so squished up they are unreadable… I read I needed a space between the two words… I have all the required fields filled… Yet, no matter how many times I try it was unsuccessful  without explanation of what they do not like…