At the back, there's a USB 3.0 port for attaching peripheral devices or attaching the My Cloud Home to a computer over USB, a spot for the power source to plug in, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. A white LED on the front lets you know when the My Cloud Home is powered on, and it will also blink if there is an issue. The body of the My Cloud Home measures in at 7 inches tall, 5.5 inches wide, and 2 inches thick, similar in size to other network-attached storage solutions.
The My Cloud Home Duo, which has double the hard drives for mirrored backup functionality, is twice as thick, but I tested the single hard drive version. The My Cloud Home is meant to be plugged in next to a router and tucked away on a shelf, and its unassuming design works well for that purpose.
Mine's hidden behind a TV on my entertainment unit because that's where my router is, so it's not visible, but I wouldn't mind if it were. Western Digital's My Cloud Home can store all of your files from iOS and Mac devices in one location, and it can be used for device backups from a range of devices.
During my testing, my unit was reliable and had no problems staying connected to my Wi-Fi network, so my files were always accessible to me. My Cloud Home setup consists of plugging the device in to a power source and connecting it to a router using an Ethernet cable. From there, it can be accessed over the web using the My Cloud website or through the accompanying Mac and iOS apps.
There are also apps for PC and Android devices. The performance of the My Cloud Home is going to depend on your own home connection speeds. If you have a slow home network, it's going to take a long time to transfer files over WiFi. Even with fast speeds, it can be pretty tedious waiting for an iCloud photo backup, a Time Machine backup to complete, or a large file transfer to complete. I have a reasonably fast connection (100Mb/s down, 6Mb/s up) and file transfers both ways took more time than I would have expected.
With the My Cloud iOS app, you can connect to the My Cloud Home from an iOS device. You can use the app to browse all of the files you've uploaded, and to upload photos from your iPhone or iPad to My Cloud Home. Multiple iOS devices can sync to the My Cloud Home if desired, so several family members can use it, and there's an option to add new users. There's an option for automatic backup, which will upload all of the photos from your Camera Roll to the My Cloud device.
I turned it on, and it took just over an hour to upload about 3,000 photos. You can also take photos and add them directly to My Cloud Home or upload photos from your device manually. The app also features a section for enabling a cloud content backup, which downloads everything from Dropbox to your device.
I enabled this, and it essentially copied everything from Dropbox to a folder on the My Cloud Home. Dropbox transfer worked flawlessly and everything copied over in a couple hours. Aside from those options, there's nothing else you can do with the iOS app -- it's only for photos and browsing files uploaded from the desktop.
The app is bare bones and frustrating to use. There is no indicator bar that lets me know what the cloud syncing features are doing, so I have no idea when a backup is complete, and the organizational capabilities are non-existent. I can view all of my photos in the Photos tab, where they're seemingly organized by date, but that's it. It lumps all photos together with no sorting options, no way to find anything, and no alternate views.
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