Personal cloud storage

I have been using a WD My Cloud 4 TB cloud drive for a couple of years and it worked well until 9 days ago. I'm getting no help from WD and this is a common problem, so I guess it's time to look for another option.

I'm familiar with the expensive NAS drives, but I don't want to spend that much money. Any other options out there for a couple hundred bucks?

"Personal Cloud" is a stupid term, it's a hard drive.

What are you trying to achieve? Backup to a local disk? Backup to a server on the internet (ie "cloud"). Both with one product?

No, I'm not looking for a backup storage. I want a hard drive connected to my network that I can access remotely.. a "personal" cloud...not iCloud, Amazon Cloud, etc..

That's not a cloud, that's just file storage with remote access. Do you want occasional access, or will you be doing it constantly? How much data are you talking about that you need remote access to?

I just mirror stuff I want access to anywhere on Dropbox, since I don't need anything big. I also back up some things to Crashplan and do a restore if I need access.

i have a Seagate NAS that has worked just fine. Allows remote access but I never set it up. I stream music from it all over the house. Back up with standard applications.

Seagate Central is what it is called, i think i paid 150 bucks for a three TB drive.

ShotByTom wrote in post #17604512
I have been using a WD My Cloud 4 TB cloud drive for a couple of years and it worked well until 9 days ago. I'm getting no help from WD and this is a common problem, so I guess it's time to look for another option.

I'm familiar with the expensive NAS drives, but I don't want to spend that much money. Any other options out there for a couple hundred bucks?

I have a Synology 2-Bay NAS drive, this should give you options of the type of RAID backup types, RAID 0 is like backing up to normal separate drives, RAID 1-5 is different types of how the NAS drive backs up
https://en.wikipedia.o​rg/wiki/Standard_RAID_​levels, saying that, I am just using RAID 0 at the moment, because I only have the two bay drive option because if I used the others, it will reduce the capacity of both drives

Well Tim, the rest of the free world calls it a "cloud"! I want access to all of my documents and photos from anywhere, about 3 TB of data.

I don't want it to be a backup, I have plenty of on and off site backups.

I like Seagate Central, looks like the 4 TB is pretty affordable. How is the interface? That's one of the things I really hate about WD MyCloud, the interface really sucks!

ShotByTom wrote in post #17605892
Well Tim, the rest of the free world calls it a "cloud"! I want access to all of my documents and photos from anywhere, about 3 TB of data.

I don't want it to be a backup, I have plenty of on and off site backups.

I like Seagate Central, looks like the 4 TB is pretty affordable. How is the interface? That's one of the things I really hate about WD MyCloud, the interface really sucks!

The rest of the world uses the word "literally" incorrectly too, we don't have to fall into the trap! Marketers have hijacked the word to sell stuff.

All you want is a NAS with remote access.

Personal cloud advice

RichSoansPhotos wrote in post #17605602
I have a Synology 2-Bay NAS drive, this should give you options of the type of RAID backup types, RAID 0 is like backing up to normal separate drives, RAID 1-5 is different types of how the NAS drive backs up
https://en.wikipedia.o​rg/wiki/Standard_RAID_​levels, saying that, I am just using RAID 0 at the moment, because I only have the two bay drive option because if I used the others, it will reduce the capacity of both drives

I would very strongly caution against using RAID0 for your backup. RAID0 stripes the drives, and is optimized for speed (which you will not realize, as the bottleneck is going to be the system host bus. If one of those drives fails, you lose your entire array. I believe the RAID level you are thinking you have, and should be running, is RAID1 (mirroring). RAID1 writes the same data to both drives, so if one fails you will get a system notification, can swap out the faulty drive, and rebuild the array.

Yes, do remember that RAID is NOT a backup. Most RAID setups will protect against a hardware fault, some will even survive multiple faults, but they don't guard against accidental or malicious deletion or corruption of data. Backups are something completely unrelated to RAID, and while you may use RAID setups in your backup plan you will still need to go above and beyond just storing the data on a RAID setup.

If you want to get that picky, any "cloud" is a hard drive somewhere, that you can access remotely.

abacus022 wrote in post #17611608
If you want to get that picky, any "cloud" is a hard drive somewhere, that you can access remotely.

But "clouds" typically have multiple levels of redundancy, backups, and trained professionals keeping it up and secure 24/7. A single hard drive at home connected to the Internet has none of that.

I have a Synology which has facilities for sharing its data with the Internet for remote access but I don't do it. I simply don't trust the security implementation of a consumer level device enough to expose my primary copy of my data to the Internet. And I have neither the skills, hardware, nor time to keep it 100% secure myself. Another issue is speed: Any remote downloads would be limited by my Internet connection's upload speed. I have 5 Mbps up which is faster than a lot of connections, but still pretty slow.

I'm with Tim. I keep my data safe at home, backup to Crashplan, and throw the stuff that actually needs to be accessed remotely on Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. I also use TeamViewer so I can get to any machine on my LAN to access anything not in "the cloud".

abacus022 wrote in post #17611608
If you want to get that picky, any "cloud" is a hard drive somewhere, that you can access remotely.

I would say more precisely that "cloud" refers to computing and storage capacity that can be scaled up or down quickly and easily. Cloud storage can be a hard drive, solid state disk, or tape. The thing is once it's abstracted away you don't really care - you care about the performance and durability characteristics, not the media.

Strongly recommend QNAP NAS boxes. Might be a little more than you want to spend but once you spend it you will be thankful.