A fool and his money…
…Or…. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over when it didn’t work the first time.
I had severe doubts about my sanity as I whiled away a spring afternoon with the kind folks at Western Digital tech support. It was only a week ago that I was butting my head against a Seagate Personal Cloud drive. I finally gave up when I realized, quite sanely, that no matter what I did, it wouldn’t work for me.
Others who tried it either sang its
praises or agreed with me that, while it promises, promises, the experience is mostly unfulfilled, unfulfilled.
The idea behind the Western Digital My Cloud is exactly the same as the idea behind the Seagate drive. Connect a cable between a wireless router and the device, plug it in and wirelessly back up files you may need when you’re away from your computer. It’s called a personal cloud, as opposed to the cloud you may be using already, such as Dropbox or Carbonite. With your personal cloud, only you have the key to your files.
There’s a downside to having files stored on a drive next to your PC. If your house burns down, your files will go with it. A power outage would make the drive inaccessible. If you back up to the usual cloud, your files are offsite, presumably—hopefully—impervious to power outages and earthquakes.
I take it on trust that people who store my cloud files can’t get into them. But if you’re sloppy about your personal cloud password, a hacker could do some real harm.
Compared to the Seagate device, the My Cloud’s software is intuitive, once you get used to the terms it uses. Videos on the Western Digital web site (www.wd.com) held my hand as I learned the difference between a “share” and a “user.” Shares are folders that you use to back up your files. Users are, well, you and I. There also is an abundance of tutorials on YouTube.
Folders can be password-protected, or if you want the world to know how much you owe the IRS, you can make them public. Folders can be read-only, or you can give your users full access to them. Video that’s been backed up can be streamed to your smartphone, tablet or another PC.
The iPhone and iPad apps for the Western Digital drive are clean and user-friendly. There also is an app for Android devices. You choose which categories of files, such as documents, you want to back up, or you can back up only individual files. Backups can run continuously in the background, or you can set a time for a daily or hourly backup.
Like the Seagate Personal Cloud, the Western Digital My Cloud that I bought holds 3 terabytes (TB) of data, photos, music, videos—everything except applications—and costs $169. And, like the Seagate, the WD drive supports Time Machine backups from Macs. Backing up wirelessly can be slow. It took the better part of a day to do a Time Machine backup of 500 gigabytes.
If you need extra storage and don’t want to spring for a larger hard drive, you can attach at least one auxiliary external hard drive, via USB, to the My Cloud drive, which means your storage space could be much more than the My Cloud’s native capacity, which ranges from 2 TB to 6 TB.
If you hanker for a mirror drive next to the original drive, they are available, too. Now, about doing the same thing over and over.
I wanted to create a password-protected folder on the My Cloud drive called “harold.” Despite following WD’s tutorials, I simply couldn’t back up to the folder. It kept asking for my password—I mean, like over and over. A first-tier WD tech support engineer took over my screen, and tried over and over to back up to the “harold” folder. Flummoxed, he bumped me up to second-tier, where after more than an hour of messing around and inputting my password dozens of times, we both gave up.
After I hung up, I figured out a workaround that accomplished the same thing. And then, “harold” worked. So maybe there is something to butting my head against a hard drive.
I’ve decided to keep the My Cloud drive. It does what it’s supposed to do—it creates a private cloud backup—and it looks handsome on my desk. Again, if you have a commercial cloud backup, you probably don’t need either the Seagate or the Western Digital drives.
The main advantage is that while cloud backup companies charge you for their services, these devices only ask that you buy the drives. Then, assuming everything is OK at the home or office, you can connect to your backup drive anywhere you can find a wireless network. You can even upload to the My Cloud those 2,000 iPhone photos of your vacation on the romantic Islets of Langerhans.
So, if I don’t really need the drive, what does that make me?
There is a name for the condition: Luftmensch, a person whose head is in the clouds and whose feet are firmly planted in midair.
Harold Glicken / Tribune News Service
1 comment
“Or…. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over when it didn’t work the first time.” Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result. Failing once and doing it again is more of confirming the first result and therefore you are just persevering.