So I had a bricked My Cloud and am salvaging the data right now thanks to the awesome help of @cpt_paranoia … but I’m curious about something. Why are these drives using linux rather than NTFS or something easier for the masses to handle? I’m sure there’s a good reason – it’s just that I’m ignorant of said read lol…was hoping someone could explain
The My Cloud run a Linux OS. For the older first gen single bay My Cloud’s that run vv4.x firmware it uses a version of Debain. For the newer second gen single bay My Cloud’s they run a different version of Linux with Busybox. Many NAS devices run one form of Linux or another as their operating system. It is the OS that provides the interface to allow uses to access the NAS and its various features. Generally Linux and the many modules that can be run on it are free under the GNU General Public License.
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Use the following links and read the provided information.
The masses aren’t meant to have to handle the raw filing system; it’s a network file server, not a simple HDD. The file system it uses internally is irrelevant. The only time you have to deal with it is if something has gone wrong, and you choose to violate your warranty, open the box, and then try to recover your data (rather than recovering from your backup: you do have a backup, don’t you…?). Even then, it’s not exactly a great hardship to find and install an ext3/4 file system driver for Windows to give access to the drive. As you have found…
However, as Bennor points out, many embedded systems use linux and ext3/ext4 because they’re open source, and therefore free to developers.
