Viewing 28 posts - 1 through 28 (of 28 total)
  • Western Digital My Cloud
  • Rockhopper
    Free Member

    Anyone got one? I have around 1tb of films on a hard drive plugged into my raspberry pi media player. I also have a duplicate drive that I keep locked up. My Rasperry Pi is connected to my route via an Ethernet lead. Would the My cloud thing replace my hard drive so I wouldn’t need to keep the duplicate disk updated? I assume I’ll be able to watch films on my TV via the My cloud?

    dannybgoode
    Full Member

    Even with My Cloud I would keep a second back-up but other than that yes pretty much as you say.

    Except I’d look at the Synology NAS solutions over anything made by WD. Much much better kit – see the thread on Black Friday NAS deals…

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    ^^ notwithstanding the above I have a WD 750gb hdd in my mac runninng faultlessly for 4 years

    I would check your internet contract to see if there is an upload limit as 1tb is a lot. Also how is yoir download speed, streaming the Cloud service may be an issue, also will the host service be fast enough ? We have 200mps fibre broadband and sometimes BBC iPlayer etc don’t stream well so we download.

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    dannybgoode
    Full Member

    Nothing wrong with WD HDD’s at all but the actual NAS bit is not as good as Synology’s.

    I’d happily spec WD HDD’s in a Synology NAS enclosure…

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    I’m really looking for a soloution where I don’t have to copy new stuff to the main hard drive then get the backup drive out and do it all over again. I’m not terribly computer savvy – is a NSA a box with two hard drives in that makes a double copy? I think I’d prefer the backup in a different place if possible (currently locked in my gun safe!!).

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    @danny interesting

    @rock yup very smart having an offsite backup. My mac backs up to external 1tb drive automatically but no good in a house fire 🙁

    1tb space isn’t cheap though ?

    willej
    Full Member

    I’ve got a My Cloud with all of our music, films, photos and so on stored on it. I have a Pi running Kodi to play the music and films, which works really well. The photos we take on our phones are automatically uploaded to the My Cloud and our laptop is backed up constantly too.

    The My Cloud has its own backup feature, called Safe Point. I’ve got a My Book connected to the My Cloud, via USB and every night the Safe Point updates, backing up the My Cloud. Not an ideal backup, as the My Book is right next to the My Cloud, not remote from it.

    I got both the My Cloud and My Book from the WD outlet store, as recertified and have had no problems with them in three years or so.

    dannybgoode
    Full Member

    The issue with RAID 1 mirroring (the 2 disks in one enclosure copying the same this to each disk bit) is twofold. If the enclosure itself is damaged (fire, flood, stolen etc) then you still lose all your data.

    Also there is no unified RAID specification so if one of your drives gets corrupted and the enclosure is damaged say you can’t then just plug the other drive straight in to your computer or another manufacturer’s enclosure (or even a different enclosure from the same manufacturer) and be sure the data could be read.

    If you have a lot of data that is pretty irreplaceable then it needs to be physically stored on at least two different systems to be sure of it actually being properly backed up.

    RAID is not a backup solution in and of itself.

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    Jambalaya -1tb to pay monthly certainly isn’t cheap but the 2tb my cloud thingy is £89 as a recertifiied unit direct from WD. No mention of any recurring charges either.

    I like the idea of plugging a hard drive into it for additional back up. I’m no so worried about fires etc, it’s more the fact that hard drives fail now and again.

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    What i think i need then is some kind of box in the house with two hard drives in it. I need to be able to connect wirelessly with it from my pc that i use to download or rip films and then the box needs to be able to connect wirelessly to my Raspberry PI running Kodi.
    The box need to create a mirror image of the main hard drive as a backup but i’d also be handy if i can plug an external hard drive into it now and again to make another backup that i can store in my safe.
    Oh and it needs to be easy to set up and not cost £500 🙂

    Cloud backup is an option – I’m with EE and its supposedly unlimited (up and down) although as per normal up is far slower than down.

    At the moment I’m getting 10 down and 1.3 up.

    Sounds like the western digital my cloud might actually be a viable option for me?

    Cougar
    Full Member

    The box need to create a mirror image of the main hard drive as a backup

    Please read DBG’s last post again. Disk mirroring is not backup.

    I can think of very few reasons why most regular people would need RAID in the home. There are applications for it, but generally it seems to be a way of extracting another £100 out of punters.

    captaindanger
    Full Member

    I have one. As most people have said, it works ok but can be a real pain in the arse when it doesn’t. For example the DLNA server has recently started only working intermittently, I can watch things on my TV by browsing to the files but not through the DLNA library. Odd.

    sharkbait
    Free Member

    Please read DBG’s last post again. Disk mirroring is not backup.

    This. If you delete a porno film it will immediately be deleted from the mirrored drive.
    If a film gets corrupted the mirrored copy is corrupted also.

    Drive mirroring is fairly useless.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    And if there’s a fault with the NAS itself (say the backplane goes or the data holding the RAID geometry has kittens), you lose everything. Everything sharkbait says holds true, you’re adding a layer of complexity which makes recovery very difficult.

    I’d argue perhaps that mirroring is not “useless” exactly, just that the reasons you’d typically deploy RAID in the enterprise have little bearing on home usage. There’s two main reasons for RAID1 (mirroring), availability and performance.

    Availabilty: in a server that runs 24/7, a disk failure would be catastrophic. RAID allows you to replace a failed disk on the fly with zero downtime. Do you really need zero downtime in your home NAS solution? It’s less faff to replace a failed disk sure, but is it worth doubling your storage costs for the sake of half an hour’s work to restore your disk from your offline backup? It possibly is for some folk, but I wouldn’t.

    Performance: a mirrored pair means that you can potentially read from both drives at once, significantly increasing read speed. But in a home NAS you’re probably going to be connected via Fast Ethernet or Wi-Fi and a high quality modern disk will be capable of exceeding the available bandwidth on its own. You’d need Gigabit Ethernet to take advantage of any potential RAID speed benefits and even then, would you care if it’s just used for backups and a streaming source? And that’s assuming your NAS box even supports that sort of functionality, consumer grade RAID is a very different animal to the enterprise stuff (it’s known colloquially as FakeRAID).

    You’d be far better off IMHO with a single disk NAS and the ability to recover it if it goes pop, be that a cloud solution or a USB drive in a gun safe or whatever.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    As for WD,

    I’ve never used WD Cloud though I suppose “someone else’s computer on the Internet” storage is much of a muchness.

    Drives wise, they’d probably be my second choice behind HGST or whatever the old IBM / Hitachi plant are calling themselves this week. Though if you ask five geeks for disk recommendations you’ll get five different answers.

    wolfenstein
    Free Member

    have one. it is actually good (ethernet wifi connection) ..but still cannot figure out how to upload through internet when i’m abroad backing up holiday photos which is the intention that I have bought this to begin with.. and if it has been turned off it will take time to index all files like movies and showing in your telly.

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    Okay, i understand the disk mirroring thing.

    My current problem is that i have to unplug the main drive from the Pi, take it upstairs then plug it into the pc to copy rips to it then take it back down and plug back into the tv, then I have to repeat the process with the backup drive. The drives themselves are fine but its noticeable that the USB connector on the main drive is getting a little flaky with the repeated plugging and unplugging.

    It’d be so much simpler if I could automate the whole process and avoid moving drives around 🙂

    willej
    Full Member

    Sounds like you need the same setup as I’ve got then: My Cloud with a My Book connected to it, My Cloud connected to router via Ethernet, Pi connected router via Ethernet. Rip from PC to My Cloud via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, play from My Cloud on Pi or anything else connected to your network. My Cloud is backed up (not mirrored) to the My Book every night.

    I’m thinking of moving my My Cloud and My Book out into our detached garage, so that they’re out of the house, in case we have a fire or break-in. Anyone else done that?

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Anyone else done that?

    My offline backup is in a drawer at my mum’s. I retrieve it periodically, take a new copy and give it her back. It’s not exactly the world’s most efficient system but it works.

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    Little update:

    I bought a WD Mycloud 4tb box thingy.

    I started copying stuff to it on saturday afternoon (and its still going!!) but I can access it and watch movies on my ipad and iphone (via wifi and 4G) and last night I managed to connect it to my Raspberry Pi and watch a few films on my TV.

    The only problem is that copying to it is painfully slow but hopefully this will be only time i need to copy such a volume of stuff.

    All in all its doing exactly what I wanted it to do so thats a result 🙂

    toby1
    Full Member

    How do you have it copying over rockhopper – via wifi? If so that may be slowing it down, wired from source to destination would be better but obviously not every has the layout for that.

    I’ve just been through setting up a Synology box, have to say I haven’t found it that easy, my main concern with the MyCloud was it’s local encryption, if the hardware (not disks) fail you can’t get to the data as it’s all encrypted with a key on the local box.

    captmorgan
    Free Member

    As has already been said home raid is fine but it does not protect you from loss of data through accidental deletion, ransomware, significant hardware failure of the nas, fire, flood, theft.

    Really the only protection if offers is for the failure of a single HDD in the nas enclosure, and when you buy them off the shelf with HDD’s installed they are usually from the same manufacturer and batch. This is bad.

    Why, well often HDD’s fail when they are worked hardest, like when you are rebuilding your data from the other HDD or HDD’s in the raid array after the failure of the first HDD.

    If the disk in your array fails because the batch is bad or the firmware on the HDD’s has issues if all the HDD’s in the NAS are the same batch / firmware odd’s are you’ll see multiple drive failures.

    It’s often stated that your digital data does not truly exist unless it exists three times and the nas only counts for one. Sounds like you need at least one other drive to back the nas up to.

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    True but you can plug a normal hard drive into the back of the WD box and do an automatic back up of it.

    captmorgan
    Free Member

    That only works if you do though 😉

    bazzer
    Free Member

    If you have a fat enough upstream connection have a look at CrashPlan for a cloud backup service.

    Their unlimited subscription is reasonably priced.

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    Also true but because its simpler than moving drives around then remembering which files to back up it’ll probably get done 🙂 (i’m fairly religious with backups at the moment).

    Kuco
    Full Member

    How you getting on with the WD my cloud Rockhopper? I’m currently looking at one of these or the Synology.

    Does anyone know if one works better with a mac than the other or doesn’t it make any difference? as I’d like to put all my music as well as other stuff onto one and I use itunes.

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    Hi, it’s all going well so far. I can access if from my phone and iPad, it backs them up as well. My Rasperrby PI media player find it okay for video and music. I’ve not plugged a hard drive in to do a back up yet, that’s my next task! The only thing I haven’t been able to do yet is to access it from a remote PC.

Viewing 28 posts - 1 through 28 (of 28 total)

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