Recently took over an account from another tech and was informed by the client that their Western Digital MyCloud drive was unreachable and they had not been able to access their files shared their with the computers in the office for some time. Since the MyCloud is just a simplified Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for the home / SMB market, I decided to go onsite and find out what was causing the issue.

How to find a missing MyCloud

I first investigated the shortcuts that were sitting on the desktop to figure out what was going wrong with the drive or if there were some bread crumbs as to where it was previously. Found one called Dashboard which pointed to an IP address on their current subnet that went nowhere – this was likely the former IP address of the device. Found a shortcut to the “Public” folder which pointed to an IP address that was on another subnet than theirs – this was likely from a setup before another network change and had not been removed since then. Found another shortcut to the “Public” folder which pointed to the same IP address on their current network  as the Dashboard shortcut, so this confirmed that this was the last known IP address.

Ran a network scan using my personal favorite, SoftPerfect Network Scanner, to discover what was on the current subnet and if the MyCloud was still functional at another IP address. Found that the IP address for the device had changed to another similar address, so figured that it was getting its IP address from DHCP and when the old address lease ran out it just grabbed another one from the router. Checked the router and found that indeed the DHCP table contained the IP address for the device, so added a DHCP reservation to the router for that devices MAC address mapping it to the old IP address to make the broken shortcuts work again. Tested opening the dashboard and “Public” folders successfully which thankfully still had all of their information intact.

The final thing to do was to correctly set permissions within the device for each of the users and corresponding user folders within the device to allow them to connect and “backup” their documents to the device like they were used to. Although I would not recommend using this type of device to any of my clients, it was good to get this company backup up and running successfully. If your company is using Western Digital MyCloud drive for shared file access or are considering adding file shares to your network, then contact us for assistance.