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Comment by saidinesh5 | Hacker News Reader

The crazy thing is their MyCloud line up used to support local only operation until an OS upgrade disabled it apparently.

Just their MyCloud hard drive + syncthing has been my ideal backup solution for all my devices for about 5 years now. Any document I save on any of my device instantly gets replicated onto all my devices. Any picture/video i take on my phone gets backed up to my NAS automatically. I used to host a browser based file manager and had dynamic dns pointing to that NAS for the rare use case where i wanted to share a file with someone via a link.

Such a shame I'll have to re do all this set up if/when i need to move away from that drive...

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I'm using Resilio Sync (former bittorrent sync) to make a backup sync from all devices (one-way sync) and then do a normal backup of that folder to other media since a sync folder isn't really a backup. No cloud functionality, only your own devices with the speed of whatever network speed you have at home or on the go.

Why not just use syncthing? I do that. You can even set up an encrypted node on e.g. an aws vps. That node won't see any of your files but still any them.

I'm currently using syncthing itself on MyCloud.

I had to run a little script to enable third party applications on MyCloud and installed syncthing from that.

Thanks for the tip about the encrypted node though

Nope, MyCloud NAS with latest upgrades and without any cloud works fine here. I wouldn't even think of trusting my data to WD whose expertise is hard drives and anything software is obviously an unloved and underfunded child, born out of necessity.

Hey I have a WD MyCloud with OS5 (updated to latest release) and it works localy. I've disabled all the silly cloud and online services and I use it perfectly fine as a local NAS. It's people who were using the cloud features that are affected by this hack.

To be clear and honest, other vendors have faced similar issues. I remember D-Link many years ago and Synology more recently. We have to accept that all cloud services are susceptible to attacks, downtime and so it's always good to have local (and offsite) backups of your important files.

If you have automatic updates turned on, I would still assume you were breached. It can remotely re-enable cloud services and there's all kinds of unknown implementation details.

Ohh interesting.. do the existing applications like syncthing etc.. work on OS5?

I've currently disabled all cloud functionality.. i don't think i ever even registered an account with them. I remember reading that cloud account is mandatory after the update, so i had to disable the updates.

On my current OS, i ran a little piece of JS to enable third-party applications, from which I've installed syncthing. It freed up my raspberry Pi to do other things...

> I use it perfectly fine as a local NAS.

I think the problem is the newer models. I also have a WD MyCloud, but the "newer" Home edition one, and a lot of the features do not work locally, and require cloud connections. (Even local LAN-only file transfers, or managing the onboard Plex server and such, all have random cloud server junk shoved in the middle of them, to handle authentication and such)

I had to take pliers and scissors to mine and cut the harddrive out to rescue the data earlier this year, when the internal network board couldn't successfully reach WD's cloud system for some reason. I have to imagine any of the folks who bought devices like mine are just SOL until WD gets service back up.

How do you get syncthing to back up photos on your phone? Are you on Android?

You can share the Camera folder with the "send only" mode in the phone app.

Yep, Android.

I had to enable access to full filesystem and specifically add the camera folder.

Previously i used to root my Android devices and blindly backup the whole storage with syncthing, but these days rooting has become a pain with safety net.

Every nas will have software that will sync to cloud storage s3 etc. Pretty trivial to set up usually.

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