Anyone with experience with NAS device

Best Buy has this WD My Cloud Mirror personal cloud storage 4TB - Double-safe storage. Anywhere access (WDBZVM0040JWT-NESN) on Memorial Day sale with $50 off from reg price of $349.99.

See description: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=nas%20cloud%20mirror

Anyone has experience with this device? Other alternatives with similar storage capacity and mirroring capability?

Thanks in advance.

What are your needs? I'm not sure what this device does.
Do you just need space to store files? Get a cheap USB drive.
Do you need a backup drive? Same but faster USB3 and they often come with backup software.
Do you need to access your files from home on the go. This box is probably your best bet unless you want to store everything on google's cloud.

What I do:
Everything at home is Apple so it all works together. Backups are automatic every hour.
I also have an extra USB drive for DVDs converter to movies. This can be played on any device(laptop, appletv, ipod) at home.
My critical files are copied on the cloud(finance, photos). Things I cannot lose in a house fire or computer stolen. I use a mix of dropbox(work), google(personal) and amazon(big photo backups)

This summer I plan to simply bring a laptop and the USB drive with all the movies. Then the kids can watch them on ipod/ipad and I can use the laptop for my own movies or email, web, etc. Otherwise I would just bring the ipad but it cannot act as a media server for other devices.

This is probably too late to be of any help, but just in case it might be useful to someone else, here's my experience: I just purchased the WD cloud a few weeks ago at Costco for $299.  So far, it has been performing very well.  At first, my wife was very hesitant to let me purchase the drive, but she reluctantly relented.  Later that evening she asked me for a flash drive - I asked her why.  She replied that she needed to download video lectures from an online course she is taking so I asked her why not use the Cloud?  She spent the evening downloading and storing in her folder.

The next day she had a doctor's appointment, was bored, and opened her iPad - in a few moments in an excited tone said to me "look at this!!!" I'm watching my videos that are on our home cloud???"  She's been sold ever since.

For me, I have access to my 25,000 plus photos from my phone and Android tablet.

• I use it for my Picasa albums
• My wife uses it for her recorded video lectures
• Both of us use the personal cloud to store backups of our My documents folders

The device comes with software to create "Safe points" which are essentially backups put on a drive connected to the USB 3.0 drive port built into the unit.  You can also backup to another location on your home network.  These can be scheduled.

Also available as a free download is an application called WDPhotos, which essentially streams photos to your mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones, Android.  When you install this app on your device, any pictures you take will be automatically uploaded to your WDCloud personal storage device via wireless if you are on your home network, and via a simple login if you are using wireless away from home.  You also have access to all your photos and media you have on your personal cloud

One thing I would recommend for anyone using any of these NAS devices is to do regular backups.  If the electronics fail but the drive is still good, it may be problematic to retrieve the data from the drive because it is typically formatted in Linux.  Sure, you could always create an Ubuntu box, and install the drive in it to retrieve data, but what a headache

The second recommendation is to access the drive from regular wired network for optimum speed, especially when you are first loading multi-gigabytes of data the first time

I haven't used one, but I have been thinking long and hard about a raid system as a backup.
I'm currently using simple HDD in a USB drive dock, using apple's Icloud, works ok I suppose, but no redancy except for my manual switch out of the drive whenever i think of it..... maybe I should do taht when I get home....
Oh, and so far I have had no luck it making it NAS with my router....
Anyway, I have thought often about getting something like this, just haven't pulled the trigger.
More lately, I'm thinking about just paying for more space in my google drive and going that way.......

If you have a wired internet connection, like cable or fiber, cloud storage has gotten so cheap today that it's a very good option for backup, even for large file systems.  For example, Amazon's S3 service is just $.03/GB/month.  I backup about 14GB to S3 for just $.43/month.  For even cheaper storage, Amazon Glacier is just $.01/GB/month, but you can't restore data as easily as from S3.  I use that for photos and music, 88GB for $.88/month.  Google cloud storage (not Google Drive) is about the same price, I believe.  It's safer than using an external hard drive and cheaper as well.  The Cloudberry Labs software tools make it easy to setup a backup system and to manage the files on both S3 and Glacier.

A NAS RAID box isn't really for backup, it's for shared storage and file error tolerance.  If you delete a file from the NAS storage, it's gone just as if it were deleted from your local hard drive.  Also, a good backup system has at least one copy of the files stored elsewhere than where your computers are located.

The problem I have with cloud storage is that it's in the cloud.  Meaning you don't have any idea where that is.  The company could go it of business at any time.  I think it's already happened.

I'm more of a hands on kinda guy myself.  I back up all my computers and all my data at least once a month.  When I build a computer for someone I make a startup image and keep that forever.

I bought a Hitachi Convio 500GB portable drive.
It's a wireless media server.  Music & videos stream to IPads & phones in HD.
Plug it in to a wired network and it becomes a wireless access point, as well as a media server and NAS. It's a little weird in that it's running a micro server and appears on your network as another computer.
It works as a normal USB drive.
And probably more.

It's not the fastest drive in my pile-o-junk, but it is the cheapest.

It cost a whopping $39.  Less than I could have bought a bare 500GB drive.  At that price I couldn't say no.

The likelihood of Amazon or Google going out of business is less than the simultaneous failures of my 2x2GB drives in my DiskStation   With client side encryption my files are as safe, or safer, than if they were on a hard drive on my desktop.  I know it's not for everyone, but it's an easy and inexpensive backup solution that requires zero maintenance once it's set up.  No swapping of drives or finding an offsite safe location for the backups.

One other thing you can do if you have a hosting solution online is to install ownCloud, (open source) which let's you store as much as your host will let you.  Not a bad solution if you are already paying for hosting.

One more open source project is called FreeNAS, which is essentially an operating system replacement that will turn one of your un-used computers into a NAS - good if you have an extra computer lying around that you are not using

Disaster backup & recoverey was one of the many hats I wore in my techie career.

Amazon and Google could decide to get out of the cloud business.  Everybody could decide to get out of it because they aren't making enough money.

Sunspots could take them all out.

Weather, earthquakes, acts of war, etc.

They could mis-manage it and lose your data.  They could corrupt it.  They could get hacked.  It's just a matter of time before someone cracks 'em.

Personally I don't store anything I need to keep for long in the cloud.  If it's in the cloud I also have an on-site backup, usually more than one.  A waterproof safe is highly recommended.  I carry a portable backup of all our encrypted financial data, all our photographs, family movies, music, everything digital and important, in the RV.

Strange attitude for a guy who built and maintained multi terabyte databases. Eh?  But those databases were distributed into redundant failover servers on 3 continents and backed up constantly.

Strange attitude for a guy who built and maintained multi terabyte databases. Eh?

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Not strange at all, more like well informed, in my eyes. You learned, as did I, to not be very trusting of what's out there, partly from potential hardware failure, partly from potential software bugs, partly from potential dishonesty/hacking, partly from potential discontinuance.

Yep, all those partly's added up to a dead certainty too many times. 

Almost like listening to RV salesmen. 

Strange attitude for a guy who built and maintained multi terabyte databases. Eh?  But those databases were distributed into redundant failover servers on 3 continents and backed up constantly.

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That sounds just like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft cloud services   Since they're so cheap, you can use more than one for redundancy.  I use Amazon as only one part of my backup schema which also includes using removable hard drives for my own local on-and off-site copies.  But should I lose all of the local hardware, I still have the cloud copies for my ultimate backup, and I can access those from anywhere.

They could mis-manage it and lose your data.  They could corrupt it.  They could get hacked.  It's just a matter of time before someone cracks 'em.

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You could mis-manage it and lose your data.  You could corrupt it.  You could get hacked.  It's just a matter of time before someone hacks you.

Yup.  Lots of things could happen.  The only safe computer is the one that's not plugged in, buried 30 feet underground, and surrounded by armed guards.

I just prefer to have it in my own hands, and encrypted.  I'd have to pay for at least 10TB of redundant backup space, in multiple locations.  Not to mention the network traffic. 

Ever since the NSA forced TrueCrypt out of business things have gotten a little squirrelly.  You can bet they've run their grubby little hands all over your data.  Not that that's a big problem with me.  If they want to listen to my Philharmonic recordings and watch Golden Retriever videos they're welcome to.  ;D  It's just the idea that rankles........  And probably my inclusion of 'NSA' in this text will insure they read this!  (hi guys!)

BTW, I'm sitting no more than 10 feet from a small storage array consisting of 52 drives.  They be noisy!  And they fail often enough that I know how to hot swap the individual drives in a flash, if we have a spare.

Perhaps you missed the part where I said I use client side encryption.  Amazon doesn't have the keys, I have them, and only on my local computer.  I wouldn't use or recommend any cloud service that didn't support client side encryption.

The rumor I heard was that the NSA shut down TC.org because their multi level algorithms were too hard for the Feds to crack and they wouldn't build in an NSA Backdoor.  Everyone else caved.  Just rumor mind you.  Nobody's talking.  We'll find Jimmy Hoffa first!

But we're getting way off track here!

I do store some of my 'stuff' in the cloud.  Been putting my music out there for a long time.  Only the music I own the copyrights to.  But you've actually given me a reason to check it out.  Maybe I can recycle some of the dozens of drives I've been shuffling around.  Thanks for that!