Repurpose MyCloud OS3 as backup drive for MyCloud Home

Hi all.

Hope you’re all well! I’ve asked this question on the MyCloud Home sub-forum and been advised to ask you good people at this sub. So I’ve recently purchased a 4TB single drive MyCloud Home OS4 (will use acronym MCH) and looking for ways to periodically back it up. I have an old single drive 3TB MyCloud OS3 (will use acronym MC) that I will stop using after WD turns off its cloud capabilities in April.
I’m wondering if I can repurpose my old MC to use as a backup drive for my new MCH? I know the HDD is older and not ideal to use as back up drive, but it’s better than not having any backups, right?
I’m fairly technical and am willing to explore the use of Rasberry Pi to control the syncing, or even to shuck the HDD if necessary, but hopefully there’s a much easier (and cheaper) way to achieve this.

Also open to any other suggestions on how to repurpose the old MC with OS3.

Thank you all in advance!

If you are open to suggestions then here’s one. If the “recently purchased” My Cloud Home is within the return period, return it and buy a better, actual, network attached storage (NAS) device from another manufacturer (Synology, Qnap, etc.). You are likely to end up doing a lot of fighting with the My Cloud Home due to it’s very limited nature. The My Cloud Home apparently (per posts in the MY Cloud Home subforums) can now “export” data from the My Cloud Home to a USB hard drive attached to the My Cloud Home USB port. So that is one option. Use a USB hard drive, or shuck the OS3 My Cloud hard drive, attach it to a USB to SATA (powered) adapater and reformat the that shucked hard drive to a My Cloud Home supported USB format so it can be connected to the My Cloud Home USB port.

Otherwise one is going to likely have to spend time (and trial and error) using some other device and software to perform the backup. Or one will have to go down the scripting commands route to backup from the My Cloud Home to another device like the OS3 My Cloud. For example it may be possible to “mount” the My Cloud Home drive on the OS3 My Cloud using SSH to mount the My Cloud Home and then trigger some kind of automated file copy (likely using CRON or something similar). It may be possible to adapt the various scripting commands in the following post to work on a OS3 My Cloud. Note: Use SSH at your own risk, one can easily render their OS3 My Cloud non operational by issuing incorrect commands!!!

If you are looking for a exact simplistic “how-to” for backing up from a My Cloud Home to a OS3 My Cloud there doesn’t appear to be one. You will have to consider if its worth your time and expense to try and hack something together versus just returning the My Cloud Home (if possible) and buying a better, more capable, NAS device that can easily be backed up to another local network device.

You can search this subforum (magnifying glass icon top right) to find a number of past OS3 My Cloud discussions on using SSH, rsync, cp and other commands to copy files to/from a My Cloud to another device/My Cloud or even other manufactures NAS units. Those commands could possibly be adapted to work with an OS3 My Cloud to backup the My Cloud Home.

Hey Bennor,

First of all thank you very much for your detailed response! And yes I agree with you, it may not worth going down the path of hacking the auto-backup process if there is not already a solution… So shucking the drive of my old MC and converting it to USB drive will probably be my preferred option, but I would have to look up how easy it is to set up any sort of auto sync-ing via the USB attached drive…

I shall do some more research in that regard. Thanks again and have a great weekend!

I have a similar situation in that I have an old MC OS3 and I’m thinking I could use it as a way of backing up my newer MCH device. Now that local network access to the MCH has recently been made possible by WD using SMB, I’m thinking I could mount the MCH disk on the MC using cifs, and then just copy from it to the MC disk. Could that work?