I have not purchased the WD device yet and I need help to make my final decision. I understand parent child relations of folders and have been using Dropbox for the time being. The problem I am experiencing is that if you give access or share a parent folder the rights filter down to all the child folders. When using the WD device will I be able to share a folder (make it public) and not share some child folders or even specific files within the folder. We are a church and need to share some information while other information is extremely sensitive. Please advise.
First you may want to read the WD My Cloud User Manual (http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/?id=439&type=25) if you haven’t already. It will explain many of the features/options of the My Cloud and how certain features work.
Generally a “Share” is the top level folder one creates through the WD My Cloud Dashboard. The Dashboard is the user interface one uses to administer the options/settings of the My Cloud. If one configures a Share for private access (sets Public Access to Off on the Share within the Dashboard). One can then set the User permissions (Full Access, Read Access, No Access) to that Share. User accounts are also created through the Dashboard interface.
At this time with the single bay My Clouds there is no granular control of sub folders within a Share or files within that Share. This means that if one sets a Share to private all content within that share inherits the same setting and a user would need to enter a username/password to access that content.
One word of note, if one sets Media Serving to On for a Share through the Dashboard any media within that Share will be accessible to any DLNA client regardless if the Share is set to private.
