Ive got one of those infamous MyCloud NAS drives, which we have been using for a few years to store all our photos and documents (as you would expect)

However my OH has always struggled with it, she cant access it reliably and cant get her phone to sync to it with enough confidence that she feels confident about all the photos we’ve got of our kids etc.

I had to pop onto ebuyer this morning to pick up a KVM switch (a 30 quid part) and left with 400 quids worth of Qnap NAS, which should:
inspire a bit more confidence,
have a better app and connection (can anything be worse than MyCloud?)
it has QuMagie which is an AI photo sorting system (so should be able to search for photos by face or location automatically) and most importantly its a two drive bay, so im going to set it up as a Raid 1 mirror for redundancy (and i bough some nice NAS specific Seagate drives to go in it too.

Question is, what do i do with the MyCloud?
It still works, for now.

Is it worth setting it up somewhere else in the house or offsite to mirror the QNAP, as another layer of redundancy or am i being paranoid?
I dont know if i can connect it directly to a PC as a desktop drive?
or can i pull the drive and install it into my PC (which currently has a smaller SSD drive for the OS and a 500GB HDD for storage.)

Suggestions on a Postcard?

If you can, I’d set it up as a back up of the qnap if you have confidence it will do so.

Beware of Qmagie. I would play about with it on a test folder of images first.
I added keywords to a ton of photos and it changed the date information on them to the date I had made the change.
So, when viewing mapped folders on my laptop & sorting by date there were about 600 images that all of a sudden were all positioned out of sync.

I ended up finding a program to adjust the metadata and set them back to the correct value. Took bloody ages.

I had one, prised it open and put the actual drive in a bog standard usb housing, for occasional backups to go in a safe place.

Is it worth setting it up somewhere else in the house or offsite to mirror the QNAP, as another layer of redundancy or am i being paranoid?
I dont know if i can connect it directly to a PC as a desktop drive?
or can i pull the drive and install it into my PC (which currently has a smaller SSD drive for the OS and a 500GB HDD for storage.)

Yes…. you can do all of those things.

Depends how many drives/what capacity you have in the WD, but I would probably just but a/some cheap USB drive enclosures and bung them in there. Use them as a backup, anything you want. I put all my old drives in a multi-bay Qnap raid USB box and use it to back-up my (synology) NAS.