WD MyCloud Home Duo review: Bring the cloud home, but please use it well

The WD MyCloud Home Duo is a small compact box, smaller than a UPS, with an LED light that gives it a slightly alien feeling.

Over the past few years all of us have heard the word cloud in many contexts far too much for our liking. We wait for cloud to come as if it is the promised land of Canaan, when we are already there and doing a million things on it. But there is still a way to bring a little cloud home so that all your files can reside there and be pulled down to whichever device you want.

WD MyCloud Home Duo (8TB)

The WD MyCloud Home Duo is a small compact box, smaller than a UPS, with an LED light that gives it a slightly alien feeling. It is devoid of any buttons, which means this is a device that will always be on. Set up is easy, and the WD MyCloud Home Duo needs to be plugged to a power source and a LAN cable needs to connect it to the modem.

Here I have a few issues with the device. One, why not just connect via Wi-Fi given that speeds are now quite good. Two, this device always needs to be within a short distance of the modem, which is not always convenient.

Once the wired connections are done, you use the My Cloud Home app to connect the device to Wi-Fi and initiate backup protocols. I set it up to automatically backup all my iPhone photos, which were in the region of 10,000 — it even saves the files I had on iCloud. It took the device a couple of hours to do it, with the backup happening in the background.

There are a lot of other options you can go for and the app has easy tabs for you to figure out what you need to do. Plus, and this is a big plus for this device, there are options to link apps like Adobe Creative cloud so that there is a constant backup being taken of all your work out there.

Once the wired connections are done, you use the My Cloud Home app to connect the device to Wi-Fi and initiate backup protocols. I also set up the WD Home on my Mac. After the initial login to the cloud, the Drive shows up on your desktop and also creates a TimeMachine backup option.

I also set up the WD Home on my Mac. After the initial login to the cloud, the Drive shows up on your desktop and also creates a TimeMachine backup option. I could see all the files I had uploaded from my iPhone and soon the Mac backup was available on the iPhone app. This process is instantaneous and the syncing takes hardly any time.

There are a lot of other options you can go for and the app has easy tabs for you to figure out what you need to do.

On my home Wi-Fi, I could copy a 1GB folder in under a minute. However, I think the best way to use the WD MyCloud Home Duo is as an automatic backup of all your devices and services. At 8TB there is enough space for that, at least now. In fact, you can share the drive with others at work or at home and all will have separate backup folders. On the drive, it is easy to search and find files, given that you have saved them in such a format.

WD MyCloud Home Duo (8TB) price in India: Rs 31,900

WD MyCloud Home Duo (8TB): Should you buy?

Yes, if you are the sort with a million files scattered over multiple devices and that too files that really matter and not just photos of the aircraft wing from your last trip. I would have been happier if this device had its own network, like with a smaller, more affordable WD My Passport. This is an expensive proposition, so see if you really want to buy an 8TB option, though I would say more the better when it comes to virtual space. You never know when it will run out.