Western Digital My Cloud Review
Western Digital My Cloud - Personal Cloud Storage -Installation comments and feature reviews. This is a recommended device.
I had a problem: Of the 6 or 7 computers at my house, my 650GB External USB drive could no longer hold all the image backups I keep, plus, moving the portable USB drive from machine to machine was a nuisance and it did not work well for daily backups. It was time to change and a Network Attached hard drive made sense (NAS - Network Attached Storage).
Related articles:
Disk Imaging Cleanup Steps
Western Digital (and other vendors) now sell relatively inexpensive "Cloud Drives" - basically a NAS drive, on the wire, visible from any device on the Internet. They act like DropBox, GDrive and OneDrive -- except the drive is in your house and there are no monthly fees.
I bought a single-bay, 3TB model for $170. They also sell a 4TB dual-bay RAID-0 (with two 4TB drives, mirrored) for $350 - and if you can afford it, this is the better model because it copies one hard-drive to the other, in the event of a failure.
With a NAS/Cloud Drive, you get these benefits:
Setup
Setup was easy and you should have no troubles. Basically plug a Cat-5 network cable and launch a configuration program (see software, below). The drive will be online and ready in a few minutes. But the automatic setup has two flaws.
By default, the drive picks up a DHCP IP Address from your router. Although easy, I think this is a mistake - the address should be fixed, assigned manually from outside the DHCP range. Admittedly, most home users won't know what I am talking about, but if your main router reboots and re-assigns the addresses, it would likely cause a world of odd problems. I hard-coded my IP address, setting it to 192.168.xxx.200 -- outside of my DHCP pool.
The second issue was almost cosmetic. The drive named itself "WD Cloud" (or something like that). But everything about this product is called WD-Cloud-this- and WD-Cloud-that. I got confused and later decided to rename the main drive to "WolfHouseSAN1". The name change was less-than graceful and I had to reboot every connected device and re-install some of the Western Digital software. On your drive, assign a name as early in the process as you can, then install the software.
The drive does not have a power switch. To turn off, you must use the Dashboard software in the system tray. And for something as important as this, you should put the drive's power, as well as the router that feeds it, on a UPS for power-protection.
Bewildering Software
Western Digital has a bewildering hodgepodge of downloaded software. There are a half-dozen different utilities, all doing different things and the download page I arrived at did not adequately describe what the software does or why you might need it.
Here are my recommendations:
The downloads are a mixture of ZIP and MSI files and the process of downloading and figuring out how to run the installations is probably complex enough to keep non-technical people from succeeding.
Even the names are confusing.
"WD My Cloud Mirror" is the main installation program -- use this even if you did not buy the Mirrored drive. It should have been called "WD MyCloud Setup". This program was enough to get the drive online but you will also need to install Quick View to get to the advanced settings. These should have been part of the setup program.
"WD Smartware Update" is the program for backups (why wasn't it called "Smartware Backup"?) and even though it is called "update," it is not a patch or update -- it is the real program. This is the reason you bought the drive and you need to install this separately.
Image Backup
I bought the device to hold my Acronis (a third-party backup utility) image backups. Acronis saw the drive* and ran the over-the-wire backup but the first 80G backup took 30 hours.
The cause of the slowness is a downstream 10/100mb switch, which I pass through on my way to this device. Further research confirmed this to be the culprit. This drive, and all devices that intend to talk to it, must be on a gigabit network. I will have to retire my 10/100 switch.
After moving the drive to the main router, speeds are still nothing to brag about. The backup mentioned above still took 15 hours. Granted, image backups are particularly large. Launch them at night and let them run unattended. But if you needed to snap an image before a big software change, you will have to resort to a regular external USB drive, just for the speed.
* Using Acronis on the Western Digital Cloud drive required minor adjustments in the backup job. Specify the local workstation's login credentials (e.g. the account used to login into the workstation. For example, with Windows 8, JSmith@gmail.com). For the destination, use a UNC path to one of the Shares defined on the SAN; for example "\\wolfhouseSAN1\Bak". Within that share, create a sub-directory to hold the backup. After this, the image backup will run, albeit slowly. Too bad Western Digital did not include an Image Backup utility with this drive.
Restoring an image with Acronis is more problematic. The bootable Acronis recovery disk will not be able to see the cloud drive -- even though the Acronis Windows client was able to backup the original drive. The difference being Acronis backup ran in Windows, with Windows drivers, the restore runs in Linux. To restore to a bare-metal replacement drive, install Windows and Acronis to the new machine -- this is admittedly horrible. Instead, what I do is copy the image (.tib files) from the Western Digitial drive, to a USB drive, then boot the Acronis Linux disk. From here, run a standard restore. Of course, if you are trying to restore just a file or a directory or two, you will not have these problems; launch the program and restore the file.
Related: When making any disk-image backup (using a third-party program, such as Acronis), be sure to follow the steps documented here: Disk Imaging Cleanup Steps
Data Backup
For normal day-to-day file backups, use the "Smartware" backup utility that comes with the Western Digital. This is a slick program but there are several decisions you have to make and it has limitations.
It can run two types of backups: A Category Backup, where it looks at the entire drive for particular file extensions or it can backup file-by-file, folder-by-folder. Both types have limitations and benefits, as described below. In the end, I chose the Folder backup. With either type, you can run a continuous backups, where a saved file is instantly backed-up, or you can set a schedule.
The different types of backups are:
Scheduled backup of my data folders has been glorious. Automatic and mostly unattended. As a bonus, you can reach into the backups folders from your tablet or phone and show all your friends the pictures you took the day before, without having to download them to your phone; just reach into your cloud drive and look at last-night's backup. This is not as the software was intended, but it works really well.
Other Backup Concerns
Because the drive lives in my house, it is susceptible to fires, floods and other disasters; this type of drive does not replace an offsite backup. I still use GDrive (OneDrive, DropBox, etc.) for important off-site data backups of my most important files.
I wish the Smartware backup could run multiple tasks against my drive. With this, I could launch a second backup and move selected files to my GDrive or OneDrive folders and allow those utilities to make their offsite backup.
Then there is this concern: How does one backup the backup drive? The Smartware utility provides a "Safepoint", which can mirror the entire drive, but then you would need a second drive large enough to hold this drive. If you can afford to, buy the dual-bay mirrored drive, which helps solve part of this problem. I will have to explore this idea sometime in the future.
As a File Share
The drive can also act as a standard network file share. Files saved on a share are available to all of your devices, all in a central location. However, this has been vaguely disappointing.
On the home network, seeing the share, saving and retrieving files, has been noticeably slow -- even after moving the drive to a gigabit switch (the drive was unusable on a 10/100 switch). The slowness is found in two main areas.
If the drive is busy running a backup, it will be slow for other clients - taking 15 to 30 seconds to load even a minor document. And, if the cloud-drive is asleep due to inactivity, it will take 40 to 50 seconds to wake and retrieve the file.
If everything is awake and a big image backup is not running in the background, the performance is good. To retrieve a file, select "Network" on the file-open dialog.
The drive supports separate user accounts and you can build multiple shares (folders), exposing them to the Internet or keeping them private to your network. Essentially, the drive appears as an SMB NT Server, with shares on the disk pack. This works as expected and the details are too boring to explain here. Share and other settings are exposed in the System Tray's Dashboard.
USB Connections
The drive has a USB 3 port and you will need a male-to-male USB 3 cable, not supplied. But to my surprise, the drive would not register when plugged in. It turns out this USB port is only compatible with the USB 3 port on routers (WDC.com Answer 1544) and only more expensive routers have this feature. The port can also be used to plug in an External USB 3 hard drive and it can act as an additional Share, managed by the cloud software, or more interestingly, can be the backup drive for a "Safepoint" backup of the backup drive (more below).
In any case, the limitation about not being able to mount the drive directly to a PC was not mentioned on the box and this means I cannot run Image backups or restored directly on the drive (This is why you cannot use Acronis to directly restore when booting from the Recovery disk).
Some may complain the drive will not run over wireless. If it could, it would take a month to run a backup.
As a Streaming Device
The drive also supports streaming. For instance, I copied all of my digitized music to the Public Music folder, turned on the streaming feature, and now I have access to my music, from any device, both on the internal network and from the Internet. This has been a very entertaining feature and I was completely surprised about how useful this was. See this article for details: Keyliner Streaming Music with a Western Digital Drive.
Conclusions
The drive is working well as a backup drive, both when using the Smartware utility and with third-party backup programs. Image backups are leisurely when compared to a direct-connected USB drive. This is a network-attached device and it will never be as fast as a direct-connected drive. If you have any non-gigabit routers, upgrade or the drive will be unusable.
Using the drive as a standard file share has been vaguely disappointing because of speed issues. Sometimes, depending on activity, it is acceptably fast and other times it is noticeably slow. I am mixed about whether I will move normal documents to this drive or if I will keep it as a backup-only disk.
Western Digital needs to simplify the number of software decisions that have to be made during the installation. I could imagine a monolithic download, with a menu-driven tutorial to help people decide what to do. Update: I later discovered that I arrived at their standard Support download page, which was less-than descriptive. Separately, they have a more menu-driven page at this link: http://setup.wd2go.com/?mod=download&device=mc -- this page has slightly better descriptions if you click the "learn more" buttons, but it still does not make recommendations on what to install or in which order.
Just to gripe a bit more about the Support Downloads page. The software listed here had the barest of descriptions -- such as "This download contains the latest version of the WD Quick View for Windows" (no kidding) and a tiny description, such as "This is a utility that will discover WD network attached storage drives on the network and provide drive status information." Is this important? Should I install it? My recommendations in the chart above should help you get started.
With the complaints aside, this drive accomplished my goals in a way that is hard to do with other methods. I recommend this product.
Additional Costs
Finally, when considering your backup solutions, there are other costs, above and beyond the price of the drive. Ideally, you would do all of these suggestions, at great expense:
Related articles:
Disk Imaging Cleanup Steps
WDC.com Downloads - Technical
WDC Downloads - User facing
I had a problem: Of the 6 or 7 computers at my house, my 650GB External USB drive could no longer hold all the image backups I keep, plus, moving the portable USB drive from machine to machine was a nuisance and it did not work well for daily backups. It was time to change and a Network Attached hard drive made sense (NAS - Network Attached Storage).
Related articles:
Disk Imaging Cleanup Steps
Western Digital (and other vendors) now sell relatively inexpensive "Cloud Drives" - basically a NAS drive, on the wire, visible from any device on the Internet. They act like DropBox, GDrive and OneDrive -- except the drive is in your house and there are no monthly fees.
I bought a single-bay, 3TB model for $170. They also sell a 4TB dual-bay RAID-0 (with two 4TB drives, mirrored) for $350 - and if you can afford it, this is the better model because it copies one hard-drive to the other, in the event of a failure.
With a NAS/Cloud Drive, you get these benefits:
- Stand-alone unit; no server or dedicated PC needed
- Large capacities, relatively cheap (3TB for $170)
- Visible to all devices in your network; disk appears as a Network Share
- Visible to all your devices on the Internet, including your phone, tablet, laptops, etc.
- No need to pack a USB drive from machine-to-machine
- Acts like a Drop-box, Gdrive, OneDrive, but lives at your house
- Build public and private shares; invite other people to use the device
- Supports continuous or scheduled backups
- Supports Streaming Music and Video folders
- No monthly fees
- Vastly slower than an internal SATA connected drive
- Much slower than a USB 2 or USB 3 connection
- Cannot connect drive directly to a PC USB Port
- Image restores may be complicated; details below
Setup
Setup was easy and you should have no troubles. Basically plug a Cat-5 network cable and launch a configuration program (see software, below). The drive will be online and ready in a few minutes. But the automatic setup has two flaws.
By default, the drive picks up a DHCP IP Address from your router. Although easy, I think this is a mistake - the address should be fixed, assigned manually from outside the DHCP range. Admittedly, most home users won't know what I am talking about, but if your main router reboots and re-assigns the addresses, it would likely cause a world of odd problems. I hard-coded my IP address, setting it to 192.168.xxx.200 -- outside of my DHCP pool.
The second issue was almost cosmetic. The drive named itself "WD Cloud" (or something like that). But everything about this product is called WD-Cloud-this- and WD-Cloud-that. I got confused and later decided to rename the main drive to "WolfHouseSAN1". The name change was less-than graceful and I had to reboot every connected device and re-install some of the Western Digital software. On your drive, assign a name as early in the process as you can, then install the software.
The drive does not have a power switch. To turn off, you must use the Dashboard software in the system tray. And for something as important as this, you should put the drive's power, as well as the router that feeds it, on a UPS for power-protection.
Bewildering SoftwareWestern Digital has a bewildering hodgepodge of downloaded software. There are a half-dozen different utilities, all doing different things and the download page I arrived at did not adequately describe what the software does or why you might need it.
Here are my recommendations:
 |
| Click for a larger view |
The downloads are a mixture of ZIP and MSI files and the process of downloading and figuring out how to run the installations is probably complex enough to keep non-technical people from succeeding.
Even the names are confusing.
"WD My Cloud Mirror" is the main installation program -- use this even if you did not buy the Mirrored drive. It should have been called "WD MyCloud Setup". This program was enough to get the drive online but you will also need to install Quick View to get to the advanced settings. These should have been part of the setup program.
"WD Smartware Update" is the program for backups (why wasn't it called "Smartware Backup"?) and even though it is called "update," it is not a patch or update -- it is the real program. This is the reason you bought the drive and you need to install this separately.
Image Backup
I bought the device to hold my Acronis (a third-party backup utility) image backups. Acronis saw the drive* and ran the over-the-wire backup but the first 80G backup took 30 hours.
The cause of the slowness is a downstream 10/100mb switch, which I pass through on my way to this device. Further research confirmed this to be the culprit. This drive, and all devices that intend to talk to it, must be on a gigabit network. I will have to retire my 10/100 switch.
After moving the drive to the main router, speeds are still nothing to brag about. The backup mentioned above still took 15 hours. Granted, image backups are particularly large. Launch them at night and let them run unattended. But if you needed to snap an image before a big software change, you will have to resort to a regular external USB drive, just for the speed.
* Using Acronis on the Western Digital Cloud drive required minor adjustments in the backup job. Specify the local workstation's login credentials (e.g. the account used to login into the workstation. For example, with Windows 8, JSmith@gmail.com). For the destination, use a UNC path to one of the Shares defined on the SAN; for example "\\wolfhouseSAN1\Bak". Within that share, create a sub-directory to hold the backup. After this, the image backup will run, albeit slowly. Too bad Western Digital did not include an Image Backup utility with this drive.
Restoring an image with Acronis is more problematic. The bootable Acronis recovery disk will not be able to see the cloud drive -- even though the Acronis Windows client was able to backup the original drive. The difference being Acronis backup ran in Windows, with Windows drivers, the restore runs in Linux. To restore to a bare-metal replacement drive, install Windows and Acronis to the new machine -- this is admittedly horrible. Instead, what I do is copy the image (.tib files) from the Western Digitial drive, to a USB drive, then boot the Acronis Linux disk. From here, run a standard restore. Of course, if you are trying to restore just a file or a directory or two, you will not have these problems; launch the program and restore the file.
Related: When making any disk-image backup (using a third-party program, such as Acronis), be sure to follow the steps documented here: Disk Imaging Cleanup Steps
Data Backup
For normal day-to-day file backups, use the "Smartware" backup utility that comes with the Western Digital. This is a slick program but there are several decisions you have to make and it has limitations.
It can run two types of backups: A Category Backup, where it looks at the entire drive for particular file extensions or it can backup file-by-file, folder-by-folder. Both types have limitations and benefits, as described below. In the end, I chose the Folder backup. With either type, you can run a continuous backups, where a saved file is instantly backed-up, or you can set a schedule.
The different types of backups are:
- "Category" backup looks for certain types of data files (by category, DOC, XLS, Music, video, etc.). Approximately 300 extensions are supported, with a complete list of extensions on the support site. However, I do not trust this type of backup because if you have unexpected types, such as my Macro Files, or other unusual file types or databases, it will not back them up.
- Backup of Selected Folders - Mark all the folders you want to backup, and exclude those that you don't (excluding Temp and Cache folders, for example). I recommend this method, but it has one giant caution.
The biggest problem with a File Backup is you have to include and exclude folders. When you mark a folder to backup, all files and folders within are backed up. On the surface this is okay, but if new folders are added at a root of a folder, it will *not* be backed up by default. (A better design would have been to select the top-most folder, then mark selected subfolders to exclude. This way, any newly-added files and folders would automatically be selected. Sadly, the software does not work this way at the top-most folders. Because of this, you will have to periodically check to make sure all directories are included in the backup.
- For either the Category or the Selected Folder backup, you can choose "Continuous backups" (where as soon as a file is saved, it is backed up) or a "Scheduled Backup" where it is periodically backed up, on a timed schedule.
The Continuous backup is a neat idea, but chatty. If you save your Excel sheet multiple times during the day, it will backup multiple times. I have the software set to keep 5 generations (5 copies or revisions of each file). With a continuous backup, you may consume the generational backups sooner than expected. All is handled automatically, but it is nice to have a backup of a file from 3 days ago. You may (or may not) lose some of this ability with a continuous backup.
The other option is a Scheduled backup -- which I like. At first I had the backup set to run "Once per day" at 8:00am (when I was likely not using the computer), but I found the machine was usually asleep and it would skip the backup. When the machine woke, usually in the evening, it does not pickup and run the missed schedule; instead, it waits until the next (8:00am) job. When I realized this, I had missed 5 days of backups.
To work around this, switch to the "Every Hour" backup. This way, if a schedule is missed, it will catch-up the next time the computer is in use and you are not beating the drive with a continuous backup. This also gives better control over the generational backups.
Illustrated on the above-right is the utility's status. As you can see, I have 18GB of data backed up (Selected folders) with a thin sliver of them pending. I excluded 61GB of programs, operating system and temp files, knowing I had an Image backup with Acronis.
Scheduled backup of my data folders has been glorious. Automatic and mostly unattended. As a bonus, you can reach into the backups folders from your tablet or phone and show all your friends the pictures you took the day before, without having to download them to your phone; just reach into your cloud drive and look at last-night's backup. This is not as the software was intended, but it works really well.
Other Backup Concerns
Because the drive lives in my house, it is susceptible to fires, floods and other disasters; this type of drive does not replace an offsite backup. I still use GDrive (OneDrive, DropBox, etc.) for important off-site data backups of my most important files.
I wish the Smartware backup could run multiple tasks against my drive. With this, I could launch a second backup and move selected files to my GDrive or OneDrive folders and allow those utilities to make their offsite backup.
Then there is this concern: How does one backup the backup drive? The Smartware utility provides a "Safepoint", which can mirror the entire drive, but then you would need a second drive large enough to hold this drive. If you can afford to, buy the dual-bay mirrored drive, which helps solve part of this problem. I will have to explore this idea sometime in the future.
As a File Share
The drive can also act as a standard network file share. Files saved on a share are available to all of your devices, all in a central location. However, this has been vaguely disappointing.
On the home network, seeing the share, saving and retrieving files, has been noticeably slow -- even after moving the drive to a gigabit switch (the drive was unusable on a 10/100 switch). The slowness is found in two main areas.
If the drive is busy running a backup, it will be slow for other clients - taking 15 to 30 seconds to load even a minor document. And, if the cloud-drive is asleep due to inactivity, it will take 40 to 50 seconds to wake and retrieve the file.
If everything is awake and a big image backup is not running in the background, the performance is good. To retrieve a file, select "Network" on the file-open dialog.
The drive supports separate user accounts and you can build multiple shares (folders), exposing them to the Internet or keeping them private to your network. Essentially, the drive appears as an SMB NT Server, with shares on the disk pack. This works as expected and the details are too boring to explain here. Share and other settings are exposed in the System Tray's Dashboard.
USB Connections
The drive has a USB 3 port and you will need a male-to-male USB 3 cable, not supplied. But to my surprise, the drive would not register when plugged in. It turns out this USB port is only compatible with the USB 3 port on routers (WDC.com Answer 1544) and only more expensive routers have this feature. The port can also be used to plug in an External USB 3 hard drive and it can act as an additional Share, managed by the cloud software, or more interestingly, can be the backup drive for a "Safepoint" backup of the backup drive (more below).
In any case, the limitation about not being able to mount the drive directly to a PC was not mentioned on the box and this means I cannot run Image backups or restored directly on the drive (This is why you cannot use Acronis to directly restore when booting from the Recovery disk).
Some may complain the drive will not run over wireless. If it could, it would take a month to run a backup.
As a Streaming Device
The drive also supports streaming. For instance, I copied all of my digitized music to the Public Music folder, turned on the streaming feature, and now I have access to my music, from any device, both on the internal network and from the Internet. This has been a very entertaining feature and I was completely surprised about how useful this was. See this article for details: Keyliner Streaming Music with a Western Digital Drive.
Conclusions
The drive is working well as a backup drive, both when using the Smartware utility and with third-party backup programs. Image backups are leisurely when compared to a direct-connected USB drive. This is a network-attached device and it will never be as fast as a direct-connected drive. If you have any non-gigabit routers, upgrade or the drive will be unusable.
Using the drive as a standard file share has been vaguely disappointing because of speed issues. Sometimes, depending on activity, it is acceptably fast and other times it is noticeably slow. I am mixed about whether I will move normal documents to this drive or if I will keep it as a backup-only disk.
Western Digital needs to simplify the number of software decisions that have to be made during the installation. I could imagine a monolithic download, with a menu-driven tutorial to help people decide what to do. Update: I later discovered that I arrived at their standard Support download page, which was less-than descriptive. Separately, they have a more menu-driven page at this link: http://setup.wd2go.com/?mod=download&device=mc -- this page has slightly better descriptions if you click the "learn more" buttons, but it still does not make recommendations on what to install or in which order.
Just to gripe a bit more about the Support Downloads page. The software listed here had the barest of descriptions -- such as "This download contains the latest version of the WD Quick View for Windows" (no kidding) and a tiny description, such as "This is a utility that will discover WD network attached storage drives on the network and provide drive status information." Is this important? Should I install it? My recommendations in the chart above should help you get started.
With the complaints aside, this drive accomplished my goals in a way that is hard to do with other methods. I recommend this product.
Additional Costs
Finally, when considering your backup solutions, there are other costs, above and beyond the price of the drive. Ideally, you would do all of these suggestions, at great expense:
- Upgrade all routers to gigabit speeds.
- Buy a second Cloud drive to backup the first (or buy the dual-bay drive). You have to worry about drive failures.
- Pay for the professional version of Smartware and then subscribe to DropBox, Onedrive, etc. so you can have more than 2G of free space. Use this for offsite backups of your most important data. The Professional Version of Smartware backup makes this easier to manage (although I have not tried this myself).
- Image backups are highly recommended. Buy a third-party product, such as Acronis.
- Sadly, in order to restore an image from the WD Cloud Drive (a disaster), you will need an external USB-3 drive and a laptop. You will be forced to copy the backup to the USB before you can restore the image. You wouldn't need this if the WD drive could connect via USB.
- Put this drive on a UPS battery power -- after all, this is a spinning hard disk and it will not like power failures. The router should be on UPS too. As you can see, this can get complicated.
Related articles:
Disk Imaging Cleanup Steps
WDC.com Downloads - Technical
WDC Downloads - User facing
Western Digital My Cloud Review
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Reviewed by Unknown
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