Western Digital My Cloud update adds phone backup, shared albums with friends
The storage company also updated its My Cloud Mirror backup devices, making them faster.
WD announced the new software, known as My Cloud OS 3, at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin. The software will be available for download on Sept. 21, while the new My Cloud Mirror devices, ranging from 4TB to 8TB, can be pre-ordered now for shipment on Sept. 30.
Why this matters: As cloud storage becomes more pervasive—including the automatic backup of photos from cell phones—the demand for local storage decreases. After all, anything backed up online should be available anytime, right WD wants you to change that way of thinking, giving you local control of files that normally would be floating off somewhere in the cloud.
According to Scott Vouri, vice president of consumer marketing for WD, the company has sold 1.6 million My Cloud storage devices, which began as WD’s MyBook external storage and evolved to take on more and more NAS capability over time. The updated My Cloud Mirror drives, for example, include a pair of USB 3.0 ports as well as a gigabit ethernet connection. The new Cloud OS 3 takes that NAS capability even further by treating the drives as a storage solution for wide-area networks.
“It’s because of the focus on software and ease of use, and the feedback that users have given us—that’s why we’re doubling down on our investment on My Cloud,” Vouri said. “How can we make this even more useful to users on a daily basis”
Vouri said WD surveys its customers to solicit new feature ideas. The number-one feature request was data syncing, he said. The three new things in My Cloud OS 3 are data syncing, shared albums, and a new Web management interface, Vouri said.
With the new Cloud OS 3, users now have the option either to sync or back up data by manually selecting a series of shared folders. A MyCloud app for iOS and Android will also allow users to load synced files on their phones.
On a desktop with a spacious, multi-terabyte hard drive, the difference between backing up and syncing files is largely academic. Everything in a synced folder is immediately available to a user, while a backed-up file simply stores a copy in another location. (The OS will save the previous four revisions of a document, Vouri added.) A phone, however, may simply not have the room to sync hundreds of gigabytes of data, and for that reason the My Cloud app turns off syncing by default.
The My Cloud mobile apps now allow users to back up data to the My Cloud device, for those who just want the peace of mind of a local copy of their photos close at hand. Like the cloud storage services offered by Apple, Google, and Microsoft, you can specify photos to be backed up only over Wi-Fi to limit cellular data usage, according to Greg Kopotic, a product manager for WD.
Even better, users can now send a link to their friends to create shared albums of photos (from a reunion or wedding, for instance) that are stored on the My Cloud drive. While the uploads aren’t automatic—the link generates a Web page that allows those friends to manually upload selected photos—they are all pushed to the drive over the My Cloud owner’s broadband connection. Only photos are stored, not videos, Vouri said. A Web interface also allows users to access their My Cloud data anywhere, including on devices like Chromebooks, he said.
If a Web interface sounds clunky—well, WD has thought of that, too. Part of the new My Cloud OS is a new API, where developers can write apps to access data stored on My Cloud devices; the other is a new device SDK, where apps can run natively on My Cloud itself.
WD is working with Adobe, for example, to save documents automatically to the My Cloud backup devices as well as Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and will provide two free camera licenses to be used with Milestone Systems’s IP security software, which will write data to the My Cloud.
Western Digital has also updated its My Cloud Mirror backup solutions, which, by default, places two hard drives in a RAID 1 backup configuration. (It’s also between 1.5X and 2 times faster, thanks to an upclocked Marvell 385 chip running at 1.3GHz.) So for the three options WD offers—a $310 4TB config, along with a $380 6TB drive and a $430 8TB option—you’ll actually receive either 2, 3, or 4 terabytes of available storage space, automatically set to back up each drive onto the other. You can, however, configure the drives into a shared RAID 0 pool that will max out the available storage space to the 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB levels.
WD, Seagate, and others would like you to think of external storage as a convenience, in much the same way you see cloud services like Google Photos. Unlike Google, Dropbox or other services, though, you’re being asked to pay for it right up front.