Back it up with WD's My Cloud Mirror!

 As a photographer, blogger, and just regular old mom, it's pretty ridiculous how many photos I take and have. I am awful at "culling" which means narrowing down your photos while deleting the bad ones and just editing the best photos you took. Now, most days I take some photos, on my phone, and maybe a few on my real camera, but other days I take 495 photos, shot in RAW format with my DSLR. That means each file is roughly 20 MB per file. I am not going to be all geeky and do the math conversions of megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. So, I'll let you figure it out if you want.

What I need to tell you though is there have been times in my past that I have neglected my back up. So much so,our very first WD My Cloud made it to our house one day to save all my photos from my laptop which was at death's door. Thank goodness we were able to save those files! Years of hard work and memories!

When it comes to hardware and the really technical stuff, I like to let my husband weigh in becuase he has had a long-time interest in technology and is our resident Geek Squad. So, I thought I'd ask him to tell us a little about why he's chosen WD products over the years. I took a few snippets from what he wrote to share with you. 

"I became really interested in their network attached storage, NAS, devices and did some research. I loved the idea mainly because I wanted an external backup that was available over the network. Our first NAS was the WD TV live hub. It was a terabyte hard drive with network interface built into a set top box that connected to your tv. You could use the hard drive for storage but also play any saved videos or songs on your tv. There were also some services like Pandora, YouTube, and Netflix that you could access from it. I wanted the network attached drive to be able to access and back up from multiple computers on the network. Stephanie's computer, laptop and my computer. The device also had a upnp media server but I found that it didn't update the media listing frequently enough.

When Stephanie's computer crashed and I needed to backup everything before reinstalling Windows I purchased a WD My Cloud. I liked it because it is a NAS drive that also has a USB 3 port for super fast local transfers. It also has the my cloud service allowing you to access your files from your phone or another computer outside of your home network. This was a great feature. I like being able to access our files anywhere at anytime. I had previously run a ftp server from one of the computers on our network to allow this, but with this device that wasn't necessary. All computers could be off and you can still get your files. I also like the upnp sever. It updates the file listing as soon as you put a file on it. We are able to watch videos, listen to songs, view pictures from the drive on our roku tv. I use this drive for all of my backups and some of Stephanie's."

Enter My new WD My Cloud Mirror! 

"This two drive NAS will be the only onsite backup for your files. We currently have an offsite backup via a web service, but I like the redundancy of having an onsite backup as well. You can never be too careful. You can't afford to lose pictures as they can not be recreated. The difference in the my cloud and the my cloud mirror is that the my cloud is just one drive. The mirror is two drives in one device. You can install the WD sync software on your computer and set it up to automatically backup. The mirror comes into play as you save to one drive the device automatically makes a identical copy on the second drive. You now have three copies of the same file. This protects you from a computer crash and a NAS drive failure. This device also has the my cloud features of remote access via the app or desktop software."

We had to set it up on my husband's desk due to the only place to plug it in via ethernet, but I can access it from my computer in the office through our network. This is so easy and convenient!  It's also not too bad to look at. When we finally get our office set up it will look nice on the shelving with the rest of our electronics! I can't wait to have my office really set up, but it's a lot of work! 

This was pretty simple to get going and start the back up process. Basically plug-n-play, but the actual syncing part and getting all your files backed up (and double backed up with this guy) my take a little while depending on how many files you have!

I feel so much better that I have an actual hard, in my hands device for my back up. I can use this in so many ways for photography and blogging. I can not say enough about how happy I am to have an easy accessible back-up storage!

My Cloud is available in 2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB and 6 TB capacities check here for pricing and additional information! 

My Cloud Mirror (my new device) is available in 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB.

My Cloud Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP)
• $309.99 USD for 4 TB
• $369.99 USD for 6 TB
• $409.99 USD for 8 TB

My Cloud Mirror comes with a 2-year limited warranty. My Cloud Mirror is compatible with Windows® 10, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 7 or Windows Vista®, Mac OS® X El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks™, Mountain Lion™, Lion™, as well as DLNA®/UPnP® enabled devices.