Western Digital 'MyCloud' Is Down 5 Days and Counting 127
Nemo the Magnificent (2786867) writes "A friend of mine bought a Western Digital 'MyCloud' NAS server (non-RAID) a couple of weeks ago. WD implements the cloud service through its wd2go.com site. He reports that that site is down and has been since last Wednesday. No word on when it'll be back up. The only official announcements are daily repeats of this canned posting: 'Our My Cloud and My Book Live users are experiencing intermittent issues with WD servers that enable remote access when using these products. These issues include poor transfer speeds and/or inability to connect remotely. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and we are working very hard to resolve these issues and resume normal service as soon as possible. We thank you for your patience and will provide updates as they are available.'"
HDD != Cloud (Score:1, Insightful)
Choose your vendor carefully. HDD manufacturers are probably not good at cloud services, just because it's not their core business, nor is it close to their core business. I could've told you that. You want cloud storage? Go DropBox, Amazon, Google. These guys know what they're doing.
Now, don't treat this storage as safe or secure. It's cloud storage. Safe is copied over to at least two different remote locations plus at least two local storage devices. Secure is encrypted and offline. Cloud is neither, but it is convenient.
The key here is to know what you are doing, which isn't always obvious.
DynDNS and a real NAS (Score:2, Insightful)
Cut out the middleman and no downtime from corporate ineptitude.
Re:When should you abandon a service for error? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's pretty much routine these days, just like it has been for the last... well, 34 years that I've been dealing with computers personally. Management doesn't see any reason to spend the (to be honest, fairly large chunks of) money to do a truly bullet-proof deployment that can tolerate things going pear-shaped without loss or interruption of service, because the salesman who sold them the tech swore on his mother's grave that it was bullet-proof and you didn't need to worry (his mother's still alive and running a three-card Monte scam in the Bronx, BTW). Murphy, being Murphy, puts his two cents in, and deployments go pear-shaped. And the users get to suffer for it.
Of course, I wouldn't buy WD's service anyway. Residential Internet's not suited for heavy upload, which is what you'll be doing fetching files from your drive at home, and that's on top of having to depend on a cloud service run by a company that's not a heavy-duty cloud service provider. Instead I'd buy a NAS box for the local network that doesn't depend on someone else's servers, and use Dropbox or Google Drive or the like for cloud storage. I'd also consider the cloud storage ephemeral and never ever put 100% trust in it, if I really have to have the data available then it goes on CD/DVD or thumb drive or a laptop's hard drive. Trust not in someone else's servers, for you can do nothing about any problems on their end and you are not a large enough chunk of their business that you can force them to jump when you say "Frog.".
Re:DynDNS and a real NAS (Score:5, Insightful)
Cut out the middleman and no downtime from corporate ineptitude.
Great. Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors how to implement DynDNS, how to poke holes in their firewall, and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.
The point of these devices is that a lay person can plug it in to their home network, put in a username and password, then access their 4TB drive anywhere on the world.
I've got one, I've got a 2TB collection of data that I regularly syphon files from when I am traveling. It is easy and works great, I don't need to leave a PC running (draining my wallet through the power company) to access all the data since it is a low-power device. It is as fast as my internet speed and costs nothing for the service.
Re:DynDNS and a real NAS (Score:0, Insightful)
Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors how to implement DynDNS, how to poke holes in their firewall, and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.
If they're technically illiterate, perhaps they should address that before attempting technical things?
Re:HDD != Cloud (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously you don't know how marketing works.
It's In The Cloud. Therefore, since it is In The Cloud, it is at once, Secure, Reliable and Available.
This is how marketing terms work. And WD's MyCloud is exactly that--marketing. Stop making apologies for them.
Re:HDD != Cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
He was explaining what the service was to someone who clearly didn't know, the difference between that and apologising is pretty vast so I'm surprised you couldn't spot the difference. Believe it or not, one doesn't need to defend a service provider in order to wish to help inform people of what the service is.