Synchronization and backup in a small home network

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for help; what’s the best way to set up the network, which synchronisation software to choose and can it be installed on the WD MyCloud?

My setup is probably quite common:

  • modem/router connected to internet

  • WD MyCloud connected to router using Ethernet

  • Desktop and Laptop (both running Windows 8.1) connected to router using WLAN

  • Android Smartphone, using WiFi as well.

There’s also a Raspberry Pi, but not in use.

So I have 3 devices (desktop, laptop, smartphone) with data on them which I’d like to be synchronized and backupped, but these are exactly the 3 devices which are not always on.

Always running are router and MyCloud. It would be awesome to use the Cloud as some sort of small server for the network, but as it appears to me, on the simple version (WD MyCloud 4TB single drive), no external software can be installed.

There seem to be ways of getting some basic stuff running like Transmission, though with the risk of voiding guarantee and bricking the device.

I’ve been using BitTorrent Sync which is nice but in my eyes two drawbacks:

-1 both devices have to be running and on the same network to sync (and now that I have an always-on cloud sitting in the midst of all, wouldn’t it be nice to make us of it at that point?)

-2 only whole folders can be synced, no way to exclude files or subfolders from it

My Goals:

  1. use MyCloud as a mediaserver (this works easily). Easy replaceable and huge stuff like music and videos are stored there without any further backups.

  2. backup important data using the existind devices. So, I’d like to have paperwork from my Desktop to be backupped to the Laptop and maybe even Smartphone to reduce risk of loss.

  3. Share often-use data across the network. My C# and Java projects should be accessible from any device at any time.

My questions:

Is there a way to use MyCloud as some sort of server, installing and running some useful, configurable software on it to do these network sync/backup jobs?

If not, how would you set it up? Install something like Acronis True Image on both Desktop and Laptop, and have both of them sync with the same space on MyCloud?

Any advices, hints or related stories are welcome.

2

I’ve been looking for something like that. Actually, I already have OneDrive for my computers, tablet, mobile and cloud; I just needed some way to integrate My Cloud into that schema.

So far, and in spite that it was suggested when it was launched, I haven’t found anything.

3

There is no solution out of the box. I have see posts about how to install BT sync on this cloud, but I don’t know whether this could be used across devices.

For cloud backup, iDrive is a solution that has a thins Linux client which could be installed on the NAS, maybe, but I dont’ have the Linux expertise to figure this out. I am however using it to backup my Synology NAS. The PC and device client of iDrive has sync functionality, but the content storage for sync is different from the content storage for Backup at this time.

For device sync, I think OneDrive and similar Cloud-based backu/sync services are working great, and you could use PC-based tools like SyncBackSE to sync the OneDrive content to the NAS using the PC (I was doing this). SyncbackSE support synching with mapped network drives.

Acronis True Image sync is very basic sync functionality, Unlike SyncBackSE, it doesn’t presever versions, deleted copies,e tc. Also note that you can store image backups on this NAS, but you cannot restore them. You have to copy the archives to a USB disk, then restore them. It looks like the filesystem of this NAS is such that the archive is deemed corrupted by Acronis upon restore.