WD My Cloud

Char Jackson wrote:

On Thu, 07 May 2015 23:11:27 -0700, J0HNS0N wrote:

On 08 May 2015 05:14:38 GMT, Zak W wrote:

What was really stupid was buying into the concept of "the cloud". The
whole original idea of the PC was to get away from that.

If you mean the cloud in general then I submit that it's hard to have
access to say for example a 100GB of storage from almost anywhere, on
any one of several different devices, that may use different OSs,
devices which may have as little as 4GB of internal storage and
couldn't possibly hold all that data internally, using only a PC.
Personally I find the cloud very handy. YMMV.

You can easily do all of that with a PC.

Yes I suppose I could with a local server.

I think the OP was comparing the cloud to the days when IBM brought us
from the keyboard/mainframe to the all-in-one PC. The cloud is
certainly not returning us to those days.

He also said buying into the cloud is "stupid" (above). I was
pointing out some of the advantages.

The advantages of letting someone else do it for you is that they probably
have a much faster upstream Internet connection (so you can access your data
faster)

My use is personal only, not commercial. I access on the cell network
when out and my cloud storage is mirrored on a local drive on the home
PC so excessive cloud speed is not a big factor for me.

and they get to be responsible for all of the admin tasks. In
exchange for that, they get to take some of your money.

100GB cost me $2 a month so it doesn't break the bank.

WD seems to have realized the sentiments against cloud storage, so they've
packaged an ultra small PC with a hard drive and a NIC. Plug it in and the
dedicated PC makes the drive available on the network, and now you have your
own cloud storage. From a LAN perspective, it's little more than a NAS, but
if you enable remote access it becomes (personal) cloud storage.

I skipped a few details, but the point is that you can do it with a PC.

Well maybe not everything. What about off site backup? 2 PCs and a
friends house?

I guess, based on the responses, I was not clear enough.
WD Drive is a 4T drive plugged into my home LAN.
It has one USB port also.
model WDBCTL0040HWT

The WD Cloud Drive in on my home LAN.
I can access it three different ways:
A) at home from any PC on my LAN.
1) Via the WD Cloud Server (maybe). (it's the long way around)
may not actually do this but it could.
2) locally (on LAN) via a mapped drive.
Drive mapping works on local (on LAN). Win XP Pro too.
This works OK.

B) remotely via any WiFi hotspot ('Remote PC') or other means such as a
phone company dongle to a PC. This only seems to work using cut and
paste through the WD My Cloud app that installed on the this remote PC.
I really want a mapped drive. WD tech support says no can do.
I say, WD really is very poor at writing software apps for My Cloud.

C) through a smart phone (Android) using a WD app at Play Store.
This all plays on the smart phone like other similar thing e.g. drop
box, etc. This works OK.

The WD Cloud server (at WD) resolves my home IP address and passes data
through. The WD Cloud server (at WD) does not store data other than a
buffer to receive (from a 'Remote PC') and send to my home IP (and WD
Could Drive on my LAN) data and in the other direction when the remote
PC requests a file.

I encrypt anything sensitive so data is as secure as I want it.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

On Fri, 08 May 2015 10:07:51 -0700, J0HNS0N wrote:

Char Jackson wrote:

On Thu, 07 May 2015 23:11:27 -0700, J0HNS0N wrote:

On 08 May 2015 05:14:38 GMT, Zak W wrote:

What was really stupid was buying into the concept of "the cloud". The
whole original idea of the PC was to get away from that.

If you mean the cloud in general then I submit that it's hard to have
access to say for example a 100GB of storage from almost anywhere, on
any one of several different devices, that may use different OSs,
devices which may have as little as 4GB of internal storage and
couldn't possibly hold all that data internally, using only a PC.
Personally I find the cloud very handy. YMMV.

You can easily do all of that with a PC.

Yes I suppose I could with a local server.

I think the OP was comparing the cloud to the days when IBM brought us
from the keyboard/mainframe to the all-in-one PC. The cloud is
certainly not returning us to those days.

He also said buying into the cloud is "stupid" (above). I was
pointing out some of the advantages.

The advantages of letting someone else do it for you is that they probably
have a much faster upstream Internet connection (so you can access your data
faster)

My use is personal only, not commercial. I access on the cell network
when out and my cloud storage is mirrored on a local drive on the home
PC so excessive cloud speed is not a big factor for me.

and they get to be responsible for all of the admin tasks. In
exchange for that, they get to take some of your money.

100GB cost me $2 a month so it doesn't break the bank.

WD seems to have realized the sentiments against cloud storage, so they've
packaged an ultra small PC with a hard drive and a NIC. Plug it in and the
dedicated PC makes the drive available on the network, and now you have your
own cloud storage. From a LAN perspective, it's little more than a NAS, but
if you enable remote access it becomes (personal) cloud storage.

I skipped a few details, but the point is that you can do it with a PC.

Well maybe not everything. What about off site backup? 2 PCs and a
friends house?

There are a lot of solutions to address that requirement, some commercial,
some homemade. For a time, I had a VPN between my house and my nephew's
house, and we stored backups on each others' systems. As the storage
requirements continued to grow, we eventually dropped the idea but it worked
OK for a while. Slow upstream speed was also annoying.

On Fri, 08 May 2015 10:24:18 -0700, OldGuy wrote:

I guess, based on the responses, I was not clear enough.
WD Drive is a 4T drive plugged into my home LAN.
It has one USB port also.
model WDBCTL0040HWT

The WD Cloud Drive in on my home LAN.
I can access it three different ways:
A) at home from any PC on my LAN.
1) Via the WD Cloud Server (maybe). (it's the long way around)
may not actually do this but it could.
2) locally (on LAN) via a mapped drive.
Drive mapping works on local (on LAN). Win XP Pro too.
This works OK.

I just skimmed the first 28 of 43 pages of Amazon questions and if the
answers are to be believed, you can access this drive by its IP address. If
true, you shouldn't need to use the WD app.

On your local LAN, try \\1.2.3.4 (replace 1.2.3.4 with the real IP address)

From the Internet, use port forwarding in your router.

I don't have one of these things, but I'd love to borrow yours for some
non-destructive testing. ;-)

On Fri, 08 May 2015 13:52:40 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Fri, 08 May 2015 10:07:51 -0700, J0HNS0N wrote:

Char Jackson wrote:

On Thu, 07 May 2015 23:11:27 -0700, J0HNS0N wrote:

On 08 May 2015 05:14:38 GMT, Zak W wrote:

What was really stupid was buying into the concept of "the cloud". The
whole original idea of the PC was to get away from that.

If you mean the cloud in general then I submit that it's hard to have
access to say for example a 100GB of storage from almost anywhere, on
any one of several different devices, that may use different OSs,
devices which may have as little as 4GB of internal storage and
couldn't possibly hold all that data internally, using only a PC.
Personally I find the cloud very handy. YMMV.

You can easily do all of that with a PC.

Yes I suppose I could with a local server.

I think the OP was comparing the cloud to the days when IBM brought us
from the keyboard/mainframe to the all-in-one PC. The cloud is
certainly not returning us to those days.

He also said buying into the cloud is "stupid" (above). I was
pointing out some of the advantages.

The advantages of letting someone else do it for you is that they probably
have a much faster upstream Internet connection (so you can access your data
faster)

My use is personal only, not commercial. I access on the cell network
when out and my cloud storage is mirrored on a local drive on the home
PC so excessive cloud speed is not a big factor for me.

and they get to be responsible for all of the admin tasks. In
exchange for that, they get to take some of your money.

100GB cost me $2 a month so it doesn't break the bank.

WD seems to have realized the sentiments against cloud storage, so they've
packaged an ultra small PC with a hard drive and a NIC. Plug it in and the
dedicated PC makes the drive available on the network, and now you have your
own cloud storage. From a LAN perspective, it's little more than a NAS, but
if you enable remote access it becomes (personal) cloud storage.

I skipped a few details, but the point is that you can do it with a PC.

Well maybe not everything. What about off site backup? 2 PCs and a
friends house?

There are a lot of solutions to address that requirement, some commercial,
some homemade. For a time, I had a VPN between my house and my nephew's
house, and we stored backups on each others' systems. As the storage
requirements continued to grow, we eventually dropped the idea but it worked
OK for a while. Slow upstream speed was also annoying.

That's just what I said. 2 PCs and a friends house. Seems like a bit
of a hassle to save $2 a month. YMMV.

From: "Stormin' Norman"

On Thu, 7 May 2015 20:19:58 -0400, "David H. Lipman"
wrote:

From: "OldGuy"

Made the mistake of buying a WD My Cloud Drive being told I could access
it remotely as I would any drive. Locally, on my LAN, I can map it to a
drive.

But you cannot, according to WD technical support, remotely map to a
drive
letter.
You have to copy / past through their My Cloud App.
That seems really stupid to me.

All the stuff is there on the laptop so that the My Cloud App can
access,
so why cannot they write code to connect Windows Explored via a drive
map
reference.

Does anybody know anything about this?
Is there a cloud drive that can do drive mapping? Seagate ?? etc.

I need to run a kiosk type app, no user intervention, and send small
files
to the My Cloud Drive as the app needs.

WD does have a smart phone icon like a drop box so it is does that sort
of
thing on a smart phone, Android.

It can be done. However not easily and there are security risks.

It can be done via Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning, aka; WebDAV.
Hint: RTFM & http://community.wd.com

For example:
Microsoft's Sysinternals' web site is WebDAV compliant.
http://live.sysinternals.com/

The Sysinternals' WebDAV UNC is

\\live.sysinternals.com\DavWWWRoot\

net use p: \\live.sysinternals.com\DavWWWRoot

There is also a SSL WebDAV UNC variant

\\live.sysinternals.com@ssl\DavWWWRoot

net use p: \\live.sysinternals.com@ssl\DavWWWRoot

You have technical hurdles to overcome such as understanding the
underlying
princples and IP implementation, security and authentication and the
LAN/WAN
barrier.

The rest is your homework.

Without a doubt, this is the correct answer! I haven't used WebDAV in
quite a
while, but if OldGuy is willing to do some reading and learning, this is
the
right way to accomplish what he wants.

I had a crash course some years back when we moved to SharePoint Server
which is WebDAV compliant.

We used Smart Card based CryptoGraphic Logins so my KiXtart Login Script
used the SSL UNC variant.

I like to use Sysinternals utilities so I have a script which keeps them
updated. Below is the KiXtart function that keeps the utilities up-to-date.

Function Get_Sysinternals()
DIM $Utility, $Drive, $U, $DL, $DL1, $UNC
$Utility="autorunsc","autoruns","procexp","Procmon ","portmon","PsExec","Sysmon" $Drive="C:","E:" FOR EACH $Drv in $Drive Go $Drv cd "$Drv\tools" FOR Each $U in $Utility $DL="wget -N http://live.sysinternals.com/"+$U+".exe" $UNC="\\live.sysinternals.com\DavWWWRoot\"+$U+".ch m" shell $DL if exist ($UNC)=1 $DL1="wget -N http://live.sysinternals.com/"+$U+".chm" shell $DL1 endif Next NEXTEndFunction--DaveMulti-AV Scanning Tool - http://multi-av.thespykiller.co.ukht...s/dl/35905.asp

On Fri, 08 May 2015 14:00:04 -0700, J0HNS0N wrote:

On Fri, 08 May 2015 13:52:40 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Fri, 08 May 2015 10:07:51 -0700, J0HNS0N wrote:

Char Jackson wrote:

On Thu, 07 May 2015 23:11:27 -0700, J0HNS0N wrote:

On 08 May 2015 05:14:38 GMT, Zak W wrote:

What was really stupid was buying into the concept of "the cloud". The
whole original idea of the PC was to get away from that.

If you mean the cloud in general then I submit that it's hard to have
access to say for example a 100GB of storage from almost anywhere, on
any one of several different devices, that may use different OSs,
devices which may have as little as 4GB of internal storage and
couldn't possibly hold all that data internally, using only a PC.
Personally I find the cloud very handy. YMMV.

You can easily do all of that with a PC.

Yes I suppose I could with a local server.

I think the OP was comparing the cloud to the days when IBM brought us
from the keyboard/mainframe to the all-in-one PC. The cloud is
certainly not returning us to those days.

He also said buying into the cloud is "stupid" (above). I was
pointing out some of the advantages.

The advantages of letting someone else do it for you is that they probably
have a much faster upstream Internet connection (so you can access your data
faster)

My use is personal only, not commercial. I access on the cell network
when out and my cloud storage is mirrored on a local drive on the home
PC so excessive cloud speed is not a big factor for me.

and they get to be responsible for all of the admin tasks. In
exchange for that, they get to take some of your money.

100GB cost me $2 a month so it doesn't break the bank.

WD seems to have realized the sentiments against cloud storage, so they've
packaged an ultra small PC with a hard drive and a NIC. Plug it in and the
dedicated PC makes the drive available on the network, and now you have your
own cloud storage. From a LAN perspective, it's little more than a NAS, but
if you enable remote access it becomes (personal) cloud storage.

I skipped a few details, but the point is that you can do it with a PC.

Well maybe not everything. What about off site backup? 2 PCs and a
friends house?

There are a lot of solutions to address that requirement, some commercial,
some homemade. For a time, I had a VPN between my house and my nephew's
house, and we stored backups on each others' systems. As the storage
requirements continued to grow, we eventually dropped the idea but it worked
OK for a while. Slow upstream speed was also annoying.

That's just what I said. 2 PCs and a friends house. Seems like a bit
of a hassle to save $2 a month. YMMV.

I was agreeing with you regarding the $2/month in relation to the current
business environment, but back when I was rolling my own VPN solution, circa
2001-2004, I wasn't aware of anything even close to $2/month. In fact, I
don't remember being aware of any viable commercial solutions at all, which
is why I skipped straight to doing it myself. These days, things are quite
different.

Char Jackson wrote:

wrote:

Char Jackson wrote:

Well maybe not everything. What about off site backup? 2 PCs and a
friends house?

There are a lot of solutions to address that requirement, some commercial,
some homemade. For a time, I had a VPN between my house and my nephew's
house, and we stored backups on each others' systems. As the storage
requirements continued to grow, we eventually dropped the idea but it worked
OK for a while. Slow upstream speed was also annoying.

That's just what I said. 2 PCs and a friends house. Seems like a bit
of a hassle to save $2 a month. YMMV.

I was agreeing with you regarding the $2/month in relation to the current
business environment, but back when I was rolling my own VPN solution, circa
2001-2004, I wasn't aware of anything even close to $2/month. In fact, I
don't remember being aware of any viable commercial solutions at all, which
is why I skipped straight to doing it myself. These days, things are quite
different.

My apology for misunderstanding you. Perhaps it was your first
sentence that confused me: "There are [present tense] a lot of
solutions to address that requirement...".

I certainly applaud your off site backup ingenuity. Way better than
mine. I started by keeping backup tapes at my parents house. But as
you say, these days things are quite different.

I've seen some cloud paranoia in this thread (present company
excepted). My neighbors were burglarized awhile back and all their
computers were stolen. If they had set up a home server that would
have been gone too. I think in many ways the cloud is much safer.