How to mount My cloud hone on Linux

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Is it possible to mount a my cloud home drive on Linux with sshfs or other tools?

It works out of the box for Windows but on Linux (Fedora 25 and 26) I can only access it through the web UI which crashes quite often.

Thanks

2

Hi @oshimikam

My Cloud Home is not a NAS but a Personal Cloud. This device is not designed to be used like a NAS and - as you wrote - to be mounted as a network mapped share. There is only one network share called Public available, the device’s name can be found within your network map or within the DHCP server of your router.
My Cloud Home does NOT have a Samba server nor a SSH onboard.

If the web UI crashes, try to use another browser. In our tests, the web UI worked well with Firefox and Chrome.

3

Hi @JoergAndreas

Thanks for clarifying this, but I should say that most of the shops will classify this device in the NAS section which is rather confusing. The information you are sharing here is very important and I could not find it clearly before buying this device, which was a final sale…

That being said, the drive, and the plex folder are accessible from Windows whereas only the public folder is accessible from linux. Do you know where I can find more information regarding the protocols that are used on windows to mount the drive? I really need to be able to access the plex folder on my linux machine.

Thanks

4

If anyone else is trying to figure out how to mount the My Cloud Home device to your linux distro (that does not have a GUI, like CentOS, RedHat or the linux distro on a Raspberry Pi) hopefully this information will help.

It is using SMB protocol and since it’s shared folder is “Public” you will have to mount that folder specifically. First determine it’s IP address. Unfortunately you don’t have a dashboard so you can’t directly look up your device’s IP address (this was very annoying) but I was able to do it on a mac using the Network Utility and Netstat to scan my local network. It should show up as “mycloud-zzzzzz.loc” and then you’ll need to match the gateway address to the IP address listing. For windows machines you’ll have to look it up to scan the network.

After finding the IP address, make sure you have a folder created for the mount. Something like /home/user/mycloud.

Command:
mkdir /home/user/mycloud
or on pi:
mkdir /home/pi/mycloud

After that you’ll have to mount it like so (assuming your IP is 192.168.1.1):
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.1.1/Public /home/pi/mycloud

This should be successful and you’ll be able to cd /home/pi/mycloud and ls to list the contents of what you have in there.

Good luck!

5

The above works, but I cannot find any of the files I copy into the mounted directory when I try and access those files from the app, and vice versa I can’t find any of the files I upload via the app in the mounted directory. Clearly “Public” is in a different directory tree. Is there any way to mount the directory tree under my mycloud.com userid?

6

It doesn’t work for me! I’d like to add libraries from My Cloud Home to Raspberry Pi Plex server, but I have no luck…
Any help?
Thank you!!

7

AFAIK, WD My Cloud uses two sandboxed storage areas: first is Private User Space, second is Public Share. They are virtually separated and files can’t be moved between them.

There are some important points regrading these two sandboxed storage areas:

  1. Apps can use files from User Space only

Only files from User Space are visible in WD mobile or desktop app (Files, Picture, and Video tab).
Only files from User Space are available for use in installed apps (like Plex Media Server).

  1. Special driver is needed to access User Space

You can’t access User Space folder from a Linux box (or Raspberry Pi), there are only drivers for Win/Mac. You can’t add files to Plex media library on your WD My Cloud Home via some network protocol, e.g. FTP/SSH/SMB.

  1. Files can’t be moved from one sandbox space to another

SMB is installed on My Cloud Home. It is used to access Public Share space, however this storage space is not available to any WD My Cloud app. This storage space should be used only for PC backups.

  1. Public Share is not indexed, User Space is

Indexed files are what you see in Web/Win/Mac/mobile app. Also, indexed files are what installed apps on WD My Cloud app can access and use.

Public Share is not indexed. That makes it somewhat faster. But that also makes files in Public Share unavailable to WD My Cloud app apps such as Plex.

Cavetas :nauseated_face:

  • You can’t use Plex Media Server app on WD My Cloud Home with media files in Public Share. So you can’t use FTP/SMB to update your media library over the network from a Linux box. - e.g. you would use Raspberry Pi to download movies, push them to WD and PMS installed on WD would pick them up. That doesn’t work.
  • Video files from Plex media library will pollute user space. The bad side effect here is that if you plan to use PMS on your WD, Video tab on WD Web/Win/Mac will become useless since all your personal videos transferred from PC or mobile phone will be displayed alongside with all the TV Shows and Movies you put in Plex media library. Finding your personal videos becomes mission impossible.

Solution :innocent:

  • Ideal solution would be that WD team changes how Plex App is installed. To be able to acces media library from the newtork (FTP/SMB) and for not polluting the user index, the app should really be installed in the Public Share space, not the Personal one.

  • (Not so good) workaround would be to put all your media files in Public Share, uninstall PMS from your WD and install it on another device on the network, e.g. Raspberry Pi.

Note: sorry for surfacing this thread. I’ve just got WD My Cloud Home and since this thread was unanswered I shared my experience so far with it. If anyone finds a better solutions, please share.

1 Like