I just picked this up yesterday, I’ll try to give a little background for my use case.
I used to use Google Drive with Backup and Sync, I could make a cloud backup of everything, so all of my files are on my desktop, all my files are on the cloud, and on my laptop I only sync’d specific folders, and then had access on my phone to everything if needed.
They upgraded to Google Drive for Desktop and broke the option to select folders, so now it’s all or nothing and my laptop doesn’t have the capacity to have an offline back up of my entire Google Drive. This basically renders the entire thing useless to me so I’ve just canceled Google Drive, and bought this WD My cloud EX2 Ultra.
I set it all up, had OS3 on it, tested the WD SmartWare software which does exactly what I want, so like, great, don’t have to do anything, right? Well aside from the part where the SmartWare software constantly crashes on Windows 10, and doesn’t even install correctly on Windows 11 on my laptop. The app for Android rarely connected so after a few hours of pulling my hair out, I upgraded to OS5 (big mistake).
I tried the included subscription to Acronis but that only makes a backup, and I can’t access my files on my phone or laptop, I have to manually restore those back ups on my laptop, to get access to the files so that entire program is completely useless for a “cloud” since that’s more of a NAS or External HDD application, so why it’s included with a cloud I have no idea but that software is basically a waste of time.
Next is GoodSync which actually works perfect, the setup was a little tricky but after figuring it all out, it works exactly how I wanted, but I can only sync one folder (I need to sync everything at once in a all or nothing type deal which is exactly what Google Drive for Desktop is, and why I canceled), and it requires a $40 a year subscription to be able to add more folders (documents, pictures, videos, music, downloads, etc, which makes it exactly like Backup and Sync which worked perfect).
Now, that’s all good, $40 a year isn’t bad, but I feel like buying this product so I can own my own cloud and then having to pay a subscription fee to just to use it is kind of stupid considering I could have just moved over to OneDrive or Sync.com for $80 a year, and this thing cost me $180 and there’s the $40 a year fee on top of it, which ends up being an up front cost of $220, when I could have just paid $80 for a cloud service…
I started looking for alternative software, found Syncthing, but that requires OS 3 for the .bin to be installed. Tried looking at NextCloud, again, requires OS3 from everything I found in order to install it correctly.
So, what are my options here? How am I suppose to actually use this thing? The included software doesn’t do what I want, and the other option cost money which defeats the purpose of buying this at all, and the third party options all seem to be for OS 3, and I can’t find a way to downgrade.
I found a few threads about basically deleting the kernel and it forces it into SafeMode which will restore it’s factory firmware of OS 3 but the guide on how to do that seems to have been removed because the OP isn’t the same text from what was quotes by a few replied later on so it also seems like WD removed the info for how to force a safe mode recovery to OS 3.
Any suggestions here? Sync software that will work for free with OS 5, or how to install NextCloud on OS 5? Downgraded back to OS 3? Cause if I can’t figure something out, I’m just going to return this cause as of right now, I can’t even use it, I have no way to put files on it other than using the browser, and at that point, I might as well have just kept using Google Drive since that’s the identical function.