Transferring Large Amounts of Data to the My Cloud and a Coupl,e of Other Questions :-)

Hi there, Apologies for my lack of IT knowledge but i have a couple of questions regarding my new My Cloud device.

Q1. I am wondering how best to transfer large amounts of data to the My Cloud?

It appears there are maximum upload data tranfer limits if i try and copy the data accross by WIFi which i can appear to set any higher than approx 8 GB (this was originally set to (50MB until someone on this forum gave a helping hand using the following link : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2668751). Anything above this just causes the upload program to hang.

In this situation, what is the best way to transfer approx. 1 TB of data to the My Cloud? Can i connect directly from my PC to the My Cloud and if so, how?

Q2. Can i connect the external USB drive containing all the data i wish to transfer directly to the My Cloud and transfer it from there?

Q3. I have had a few issues where by when i try and connect to the My Cloud using the ‘My Cloud’ or ‘WD Photos’ apps. Sometimes they work and other they are unbarable slow of just dont get past the ‘loading’ screen. Should a reset of the device cure this?

Q4. Is it possible to only select certain file times for back up? For example, i want to back up my music and photos but anm not that fussed about video.

Many thanks for all of your assistance with my queries. I am sure once it has all been set up, the drive will work brilliantly.

Tristan

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Hi, just spent a lot of time transferring 1TB of data to the My Cloud. Some was from my laptop (300GB) and the rest from a USB drive (700GB). I’ll try and answer your queries with how I did it…

Q1. I connected my laptop via ethernet to the router that the My Cloud was attached. I use SyncToy (free Microsoft software) to backup, so just mapped the shares on the My Cloud to my laptop and let it copy everything over. I had to leave it overnight as my router isn’t gigabit. Probably took around 8hrs…

I believe you can connect your My Cloud to your computer for the fastest connection (if you have gigabit network card). It invloves changing IPs etc, but I never worked out how to do it. I did create another thread on this. If you google ‘NAS to computer direct connection’ there’s loads of instructions.

Q2. I did try this, but it was faster attaching the USB drive to my computer and copying it directly from there via ethernet to the My Cloud. It’s my understanding that when you copy from the USB port on the My Cloud it has to copy across your network first (all NASs do this apparently), then onto the My Cloud. It doesn’t copy direct from the USB port to the hard drive in the My Cloud.

Q3. Not sure what could be causing this. Are you using the apps when you are out of your home network? Remember that the apps are limited by your network speed. If your home broadband upload speed is poor, then it will be slow to access your files when you are away from home.

Q3. I’ve not used the backup software supplied as I use SyncToy, but assume you must be able to choose the files/folders you want to back up, rather than a complete backup of your system

Hopefully this helps you. I’m still working on a few issues myself, will hopefully get it running the way I want soon…

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Many thanks for taking the time to respond, i will give it a go and let you know how i get on.

Kind regards,

Tristan

You are a genius mate. Connected by ethernet and the files are tranferring at about 10 times faster than by WIFI.

Fantastic mate, fingers cross the limit issue will also be fixed. :smiley:

Glad it helped!

Hi frasefrase,

Sorry to be such a noob here, but I have the same issue. So you are saying connect USB external drive to computer, connect ethernet from the computer to the back of the mycloud and config IP address? Did you say you have steps for this? I have seen several others have the same issue with the mycloud. I find it rather very odd that WD didn’t provide a better setup option. I just assumed before I bought it that i could easily transfer the files from my external usb drive to the back of the mycloud, but that didn’t work. Anyways any help would be greatly appreciated!

**UPDATE**

I did exactly what you described in your previous post. It works pretty well. I recommend upgrading the firmware for people who have the same question. The transfer is decent. Much better than before where I was trying to sync files from my PC to the cloud over wifi.

  1. Update Firmware on your My Cloud
  2. Make sure you have the WD My Cloud software installed (NOT THE WD SMARTWARE SOFTWARE)
  3. Plug in your external USB drive into the back of your My Cloud (make sure you remove the password requirement for the external USB drive)
  4. From your Windows PC launch the “WD My Cloud” application
  5. Copy and Past files from the External Drive to the My Cloud drive directories. A pop up window will show you the transfer progress. If you do not see this it will show you “in progress” in the upper right hand corner of the WD My Cloud application.

Thanks again frasefrase!

Actually using the WD My Cloud application on my laptop, I was able to transfer files directly from an External USB (plugged into the back of the My Cloud device) onto the My Cloud. The transfer was extremely quick (20GB in about 30 minutes, I think), so I know it was not transferring through my laptop (which is on Wifi). If you attempt to user My Computer (Windows Explorer or Mac equivalent) on a computer to transfer the data, it will transfer the data from the External Drive (plugged into the My Cloud) to your computer and then back to the My Cloud. So I would recommend using the WD My Cloud software, as that will transfer the data directly through the USB port on the My Cloud.

Thanks trjep. I will give that a try when I get home and let you know how it went. 

I tried using the my cloud transfer. But when I copy something from my extra usb drive (the one plugged to the back of the My cloud), I can’t paste it on the My CLoud directories (I tried on My Videos).

So it seems direct USB transfert from external harddrive to the NAS WD My Cloud is impossible.

So I intend to buy a Synology DS114, could you confirm me this feature exists on the latter

You can use the WD MyCloud desktop app to move directly files from a USB drive attached to the back of the NAS to the NAS. If you transfer a lot of files, the UI of the app might become unresponsive, but the files are being transferred on the NAS. You can check the transfer by looking directly into the share directory with your file browser.

Thanks I confirm, it s working now since the upgrad of the firmware :wink:

after upgrading firmware to v04.00.00-607 I have a problem with copying large files (>1GB) from usb using desktop aplication. Not whole file is copied. i.e. source file has 4GB after copy file has 2.7GB (window “copy/move” disapears and rest of the file is not copied)