Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by NCI XCOM great technology selection and service so right after our data loss incident a few weeks back where the raid 0 array failed on us due to an intentional power outage it was time to look for proper backup solutions because storing everything that isn't backed up and having no proper archiving system for our videos at the time was very very disappointing so we looked into network attached storage devices and we decided to check out the Western Digital my cloud mirror the mirror in the name is the key word here where it clones everything from one drive to the other so you have redundancy features in case one drives fails you still have all the data on the other drive and I think it suits my home environment pretty well despite Western Digital offering more business and enterprise solutions me having zero experience with any network attached storage in the past and having zero experience with sort of proper backup solutions I thought this was a fitting place to start so the my cloud near ranges in price depending on capacity available in 2 4 & 8 terabytes the main housing is very sleek with a curved front panel that displays the three main LEDs one for power in the other two for corresponding to each drive inside the unit the top is ventilated and also grants you access to the actual drives which are Western Digital red so the other side too you know specifically for NASA situations and by default they are come pre-configured with the raid 1 array so everything from onedrive is cloned to the other so you have two identical copies in case one of these drives fails turning a total of 8 terabytes into usable for because everything from onedrive is gone to the other therefore you only have 4 terabytes sort of to work with the storage the raid array can also be reconfigured into separate logical volumes giving you two separate 4 terabyte drives spanning configuration giving you one large a terabyte drive but they're all together right 0 or the default raid 1 and given me 1 redundancy with our backup archive we are sticking with rent one the rear i/o consists of a power in a king's interlock Gigabit Ethernet this important dual USB three and a needle reset switch and so the my cloud mere tries to be a simple plug-and-play solution but it doesn't fully achieve that because it's a little bit more complicated than that and for casual consumers who are not exactly into networking or not super tech savvy this could cause a lot of confusion the first thing you have to do is create a my cloud account which will be synced to your my cloud mirror it's a very simple procedure but then it comes on to the software side of things that you have to download and sort of play around with that isn't super intuitive definitely needs polish so let's talk about that now the three software's are WD sync WD access and W smart where as software there is very powerful but still needs to be simplified for you know casual consumers let's start with W sync first this is meant to be your bare bones of back up dragging folders or files that you want to backup select the desired destination on the nas or create a new folder and you're good to go now the sync will kick in automatically but not immediately which was a bit confusing in the beginning making me think that I was doing something wrong but eventually those files that I backed up I've appeared on the nas and I was able to access them with no problem however I would love to see a better visual indication on the progress of that backup and letting you know let's see how long is left until those files are actually backed up and maybe have a little button that says stop and stop or pause or something like that so that you can actually have full control of when that transfer is being made next is WD access which ironically is super difficult to actually access so it doesn't have its own shortcut for the interface instead it's in the icons beside the clock after which you can either upload files immediately to the my cloud near enter the online dashboard or create shortcuts to the folders on your Nass the most important function here is map in my opinion so if you access files often as often mapping your access is the most mediant way to enter the array and the last piece of the software puzzle if you want to schedule backups and have a better visual representation on the back-up progress and seeing where which files are moving where is a WD smart where you have three activations so it's awesome if you have multiple users accessing the same Nazz it's still not as intuitive as you'd want but it is much more powerful than the other softwares as long as you know how to navigate it so the UI initially is a bit confusing but once you learn it it's pretty self-explanatory so you first need to select your backup source any of your disks that are on your computer then the backup target this is very useful if multiple Nass solutions are connected and you can also upload directly to the Dropbox or if any of USB devices are connected to an ass all will be visible here so once that's done we move on to the backup tab which is by default presents with a stupid category backup which to me is almost counterintuitive because it will sort your files into giant mess of movies music other pictures mail and documents but don't be afraid you can switch the file backup which it makes you know ton more sense for anybody so where you can tick off folders and actual files that you'd like to move to the NAS and here you can also set a backup frequency which is awesome either continuous or scheduled and that is very much appreciated and once you enable the backup the program will continuously monitor anything new added to those backup folders so you don't have to worry now what about multiple users accessing or backing up to the NAS that is all possible you can enable FTP if you prefer that type of protocol for sharing information which by default is disabled you can add multiple users with share access control so for example if I had an uber so he can access the backup archive remotely from his home and we can share information he can upload to it and I even can enable capacity quotas so if he's uploading something to them as he doesn't fully just take over all the capacity and that's awesome you can also access your entire backup archive through your smartphone thanks to the my cloud app it works well hasn't crashed on me yet I can access all the files that I have on there and you can also do the same thing from a remote computer as long as you have the access so if you want to share video files if you want to have it as your htpc on the remote side of things you can definitely do that you can also enable the automatic video and photo back up from your phone directly onto the my cloud which is awesome if you don't have the unlimited Google photos or if you have very tiny unsatisfying 16 gigabyte iPhone and the last thing I want to mention is usability on my level where I've scheduled backups now on a daily basis which are pretty happy with but that initial setup man I highly dislike the fact that we have all three software's that you have to kind of work with to figure out which suits your backup workflow best I don't like that I would I wish there was just one suite that was intuitive simple to use although I appreciate the under the hood functionality all the sort of extra advanced features with user configuration group creation and sort of you know in the end of the day reliable backup to a raid 1 array so this being my first time actually dealing with an NES I try to look up other user reviews and consumer reviews on the my cloud mirror and there are two main issues that sort of clouds this product one is related to speed so actually transferring and reading and writing to the NAS and to non static IP so let me address the first one now so the speed of the NASS in my experience is right where it should be depending on the ethernet switch with a 100 megabits per second port the transfer speed is 10 megabytes per second while plugging it into a gigabit port on your router grants you you know proper speeds close to 100 megabytes per second transfer speeds which are fine for archiving and backing up stuff but you know it's not very good to actually using the NASS for any sort of high end processing and now on to the non static IP is by default we have a dynamic host configuration protocol so the IP address of the my cloud mirror changes upon reboot or if your network changes so this means you cannot access the dashboard through the previously used IP address through your browser and this is where the WD access comes in handy by navigating into settings to open the new login for the dashboard and so in the end of the day the Western Digital my cloud mirror is a reliable backup solution one that needs to have its setup and the UI interface changed to accommodate for less techie consumers but all without ditching all those advanced features that makes this device extra valuable I'm happy now that we have finally and proper archived backup for all of our videos that any of the member on our team can access but my only concern now is we are actually running out of space the four terabytes has quickly filled up by almost three terabytes from just the videos that I've reproduced in the last six months alone so yeah and so that concludes this review I hope you guys enjoyed it my first look at a network related component let me know how I did with the comment below if you have any advice or suggestions for future network component Hardware reviews leave them in the comments down below if you have any feedback on how we can reconfigure the NASS to make it move better let us know as well so well that would be it I'm Dimitri with Haier Canucks thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in next video