Western Digital warns owners of My Cloud hard drives to update immediately

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    "Storage titan Western Digital has warned owners of its My Cloud NAS devices to update to the latest firmware immediately.

    In a support post, the company explained it will soon pull support for old versions of My Cloud OS, the operating system on which My Cloud external drives run.

    From January 15, devices compatible with My Cloud OS 5 (the latest version) will no longer support prior generations. Owners of these devices will need to update in order to continue to access their data remotely, and receive security updates and technical support.

    On April 15, meanwhile, WD will pull the plug on all but the latest generation of My Cloud OS, at which point owners of older, incompatible My Cloud drives will only be able to access their back-up data locally."

    Source: techradar

    To check if your NAS drive will be affected, follow the instructions below (pulled from the manual):

    Quote

    1. For Windows, enter http://the device name (default name: WDMyCloud) or the IP address as the URL.
      For a Mac, enter http://the device name.local (example: WDMyCloud.local) or the IP address as the URL.

    2. Press Enter

    The instructions above are only for 'My Cloud Personal Storage' devices.

    If you can't upgrade to My Cloud OS 5, WD will send you a 20% discount code in January.

    Quote

    ↩ @'wxtermelon' If you can’t upgrade to My Cloud OS 5, WD will send you a 20% discount code in January.

    '20% discount code' to replace your drives that they decided they don't want to support. That's absolutely top-tier!
    They really should have given a bigger discount to people with drives that cannot be updated since people with more than one drive will have to shell out still a chunk of money to replace them. A minimum of 50% off new hardware would be fairer IMHO. They decided to stop supporting select drives, so they should do consumers a favour and give a reasonable discount so they can replace their outdated hardware with supported ones.

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    ↩  Alco_Rs11 I'd say any discount is more than generous. You generally shouldn't expect more than a year or two of software support for products so the fact they're discounting new products for existing customers to upgrade when they don't have to I'd say is pretty good of them.

    Wild1145

    Network Owner at TotalFreedom

    Managing Director at ATLAS Media Group Ltd.

    Founder & Owner at MastodonApp.UK

    If you're curious what the proper way to make a drive available on the internet is without creating a security hole, the solution is to set up a VPN like WireGuard or OpenVPN and only allow access through that. If you are the only person using it, you can even completely get rid of the other forms of authentication without compromising security.