Personal cloud, NAS, WD 8TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud and my MacBook Pro

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Level 1

62 points

Personal cloud, NAS, WD 8TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud and my MacBook Pro

I am thinking about purchasing this WD 8TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud as recommended by a fellow creative at work as a cheaper option for setting up a home server that will hold all my files, music, photos and videos

I currently have external 2 x Lacie rugged external hard drives; one for Timemachine, and the other for all my photo masters, GoPro vids and music files.

I need one drive that is going to hold all of the below so I can free up MacBook Pro memory and it just has the apps/software on it.

Lightroom catalog with master images as well
Apple Photos library with master images as well
Apple Music with all master music files
Google Drive files/folder
One drive files /folder
personal files

I have a MacBook Pro, 16" 2021 release, 16gb memory, running Sonoma (not moving to Sequoia until Adobe is fully compatible). I also back up iPhone photos to iCloud, Flickr, and Amazon photos. I have music match with Apple too so my music is there if needed too.

The question I have is can I reformat that WD drive as APFS, as I usually do with any external hard drive, rather than use the typical WD drive's software and do you think the drive will be okay for what I need it for?

Looking at this option due to affordability

Thanks in advance for any suggestions and advice.

MacBook Pro 16″

Posted on Nov 17, 2024 7:10 AM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

163,824 points

Nov 17, 2024 10:53 AM in response to sphinxx

If you reformat that device to apfs then you will turn it from a NAS (Network Attached Storage) to a rather expensive external HD. A NAS is a headless computer, but with its own operating system.

You cannot run a Photos library from one. Current versions of Photos won't let you and earlier ones risk silent corruption of the library. Theoretically you could store your Photos masters on the NAS and run a Referenced Library... but don't... just don't You're just storing up a world of pain for yourself.

On the other hand you can store your Lightroom Masters on a NAS but you cannot run the catalog from there.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/catalog-faq-lightroom.html and scroll down:

"No, you can't store catalogs on a network but you can store or share your photos on a network. Smart Previews let you edit your photos in Lightroom Classic even when you are disconnected from the network or when your computer is disconnected from the drive that has your photos."

Not sure about the others apps.

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