WD My Cloud 2TB Personal Cloud NAS

Still haven't been able to sign into the MyCloud App after carefully following the set up directions and my email to WD support has gone unanswered. I'm giving a 1 star not so much because there is a troubleshooting issue but because the company is so poorly prepared to answer customer problems. [Sept 2016 update] I've been using the WD My Cloud having been able to sign on after a firmware update that happened a couple of months after the above review. I'm not sure how I was able to sign in. Previously I had the correct login and password, it just wouldn't sign in. I did several factory resets trying to make that work to no avail. With the update I was able to logon as a guest, so I'm logged on as far as the MyCloud app is concerned, enough to use as a guest, but I still can't log in to see my personal file which is created in the set up. At any rate, the My Cloud device has gone from doorstop to usable device. However, I have found that it works for me in a very specific and limited way -- I wouldn't have purchased it for this but now that I have it and have deployed it's not completely useless. Pros: it appears on my home network and solidly takes in whatever I throw in it. Cons: it's the grabbing things from it where it's weaknesses are exposed. For one, the UI is pretty bad. Apparently, in an attempt to appear user friendly, the UI uses very basic graphics and a 2 column format. Unfortunately, it's too basic. The UI is a little jumpy so when you grab a folder to transfer back to a computer, if that folder has a subfolder, it's opened up. Extremely distracting, since my intention wasn't to open it. If the folder had a ton of contents you can easily lose where you are in the stack of folders you were originally looking at. Because the tolerances in screen real estate between the folder and the subfolder are nil, you can easily be confused as to what you're even looking at once this happens, especially if there are a lot of subfolders. There's also no way to mark folders so if you're doing a manual inventory and you lose track, well, you're screwed. I found that at about 230 Gb of data with 80 folders and about 30 subfolders, just trying to carefully keep track of where you are is a major pain. Again, the attempt seems to be to create a Lindows Fisher-Price-for-adults look and what you need, when you have 230 Gb of data, much less 2Tb, is a technical looking Netapp dashboard that clearly shows you what's what. You can't do much of an analysis of your stuff either, at least I haven't discovered it. You can't look at files as you would in a Mac finder - you get name of file, size and date modified, that's it. And you can't look at your files in your Mac finder either, but that's neither here nor there. Just having some flexibility in the WD app would be nice. You can't preview pics either, except by a distorting thumbnail. Since perhaps one of the most popular things people would do with a My Cloud device is store photos, the fact you can't actually see what you have is very disappointing. And you can run things like dupe software to cull duplicates. Nope. You have to drag everything off the My Cloud and do it on your computer. That's not easy... I'm talking about just getting the stuff off the My Cloud. It's really buggy. I've noticed the device often crashes if I try to transfer folders bigger that 1.2 gigs from it to my computer. When I decided to do an inventory of all my photos using Lightroom, I needed to put all those assets on another storage device. I ended up spending an entire day and then part of another day, hand dragging clumps of files to avoid crashing. Once My Cloud crashes, my experience is it destabilizes my Mac. Suddenly it will start locking up the transfers if I clear everything and resume. Or I'll click on the recipient hard drive and it won't respond, even after I've cleared all the crashed windows and closed My Cloud. I have to restart my Mac. Super frustrating. I basically use the My Cloud to throw things in that I run across while surfing and don't want to clutter up my laptop. I'm actually finding that useful. Since the thumbnails are so bad and there is no preview, I make sure to use good file name descriptions. If I need to circle back and grab a file it's easy to transfer small file sizes. Again, I wouldn't purchase it for this. But that has provided some usefulness. My advice would be, use a regular storage device you attach to computer unless you need the ubiquity of a device on your network and the files you need to get back off of it are small and manageable, or you're archiving and doubt you'll need them anytime soon. And, you gotta love all the geeks who chime in on reviews like this and blame the user. Yes, there is some knowledge required to go to the tire store and choose tires for your car. But if you get a flat a month after you buy the tires, it's ridiculous to blame the car owner for not doing a frequent sidewall and tread check in order to anticipate a failure. This product is advertised as a DIY works-out-of-the-box device for the home user. To suggest that users need to know about secure shells and folder mapping is pretty dumb. It's like saying you should have racing experience to buy and operate tires. The net net of it is, someone did not think this through very well in its design.