How to copy files from WD My Cloud to the attached USB Hard Drive – the fastest way

I had a personal WD My Cloud for a while working as a NAS and I recently added a second Hard Drive for redundancy. I wanted to make sure my data is stored in 2 places in case one of the drives fails. When I connected this second Hard Drive, I mapped the new Shares onto my computer and started to transfer files. It takes FOREVER. So I researched for the fastest method to do that without keeping my computer occupied with this task. And here it is.

How to copy files from WD My Cloud to USB drive

Step 1: Create a My Cloud Account

Go to MyCloud.com and setup an account

Step 2: Make sure your My Cloud hard drive has Remote access enabled.

This step is essential so you can connect to your drive remotely. To do this, you have to login into your drive by using the IP address and go to “Settings” Section

Go to the section Cloud Access, make sure the Remote Access is ON and configured, also make sure the USB Content Availability is ON so you can access your contents on the USB drive from your Cloud.

Step 3: Go to the Cloud to start the transfer

Browse to files.mycloud.com and log in to see your drive and your USB attached drive. You can see in the screenshot below my WDMyCloud drive with a capacity of 12 TB (4TB on my MyCloud and 8TB on my added MyBook drive that I split in 2 volumes MyBookVol1 and MyBookVol2)

You can also see my folders in my Public Share

Step 4: Transfer Files

click on a folder that you want to transfer, right click on it and select COPY

Select the destination on your attached USB drive, then click OK

Your files will now start to copy.

The best part of this method is that the copy is going between your drives without your computer. You don’t need to watch a painfully slow progress bar or keep your computer occupied with this task. you can even close your browser. Your files will continue to copy between your drives.