Seagate Personal Cloud NAS

Alobar

Addicted Member
I just bought this as a way to get my music onto its own drive, but integration has been anything but smooth and easy! First when it brought up that there was new firmware for it I tried to download that 3 times, it failed each time, at which point I pressed the "skip" button and moved on to the next hurdle. It took several tries to get my password registered with Seagate but finally was able to confirm it with their email. I am now unable to sign into it in order to use the "cloud" features although admittedly that isn't why I bought a NAS in the first place, it did seem like icing on the cake. The message I get after entering my username/password is this:
Capture.JPG
I have went back to it several times and each time I get this completely nondescript message. What does it mean? Do they have a team of engineers working on the problem, or have I been completely blown off?
I can't find any help for this on their site, and there doesn't seem to be any contact support numbers either.

The good news is I am copying my music files over to it now, just drag and drop with file explorer but there is no access to the "cloud" feature, no automatic backups, none of the feature rich stuff I was promised.

What should I do now? Amazon doesn't want it back unless it is defective and non-functional.
 
Not sure I can help much. The Seagate NAS I have is several generations old.

There is usually two ways to access the device, either through a desktop app or through a web browser. Going through the web browser should give you links to download additional apps for backup, cloud access, etc. In my case the desktop app (Seagate dashboard) is pretty crappy, and the browser based access seems more intuitive.
 
Thanks for your response . Yesterday I got an email back from Seagate that was quite detailed and pretty helpful. I was responding to it and decided to give it one more try to access the cloud features and this time everything worked via wifi, and then tried the Web features and that was available to me as well. I tested it by taking a few pictures with my cellphone and was an easy thing to send them to the NAS.

Whether my password credentials didn't get set in their servers right away or the tech helping me made some changes on her end, it works and now I have all my music off my PC and on the NAS which was my main goal.
 
I bought one last year because I was out of storage space on my local PC...plus I wanted an excuse to spend the $45 in network switches to get my network running GigE.

Mine had firmware issues a couple of times. Make sure your clock is set correctly. More often than not for some reason...that seemed to make updates not only appear, but work.

I actually disabled most of the cloud and other things; I just wanted something to make shares available over SMB. I was super impressed I could plug USB hard drives in to the thing and they'll just appear on the network too.

If you're not running latest firmware with all the latest "apps"; I would expect some issues. IIRC Segate changed a lot of stuff since I bought mine.
 
I still haven't updated the firmware yet, but everything is working great. My PC is a older model that only has usb2.0 so having the Seagate NAS with its usb 3 port is a real handy feature for quickly backing it up to a portable USB hard drive. I have since bought a 1 TB Seagate usb drive in order to do manual backups to my audio library, as I was too cheap to buy a 2 drive NAS set up as a raid. Anyway it works great and the portable drive shows up in file Explorer as another networked drive. I wonder if I could just get a powered USB 3 hub and plug in a bunch more drives that way and access them all!

Can anyone recommend a good utility that will do incremental backups so when I add music to the NAS it will find it and keep the portable up to date?
 
I just don't get why you'd want any 'apps' on a NAS.

I set up one of those seagate personal cloud NAS for a friend and killed all app rubbish. It was a pain to set up, the updates didn't work (like yours) and what's the point of 'cloud' crap when you've gone and bought a NAS?The last thing you want is your NAS sitting exposed on the internet. Mine sits behind an enterprise security router and has been running for 6 years with only one feature update (backup scheduler). The bigger 5 bay Synology NAS is gathering dust, unused as it sucks a fair bit of power.
 
I just don't get why you'd want any 'apps' on a NAS.

I set up one of those seagate personal cloud NAS for a friend and killed all app rubbish. It was a pain to set up, the updates didn't work (like yours) and what's the point of 'cloud' crap when you've gone and bought a NAS?The last thing you want is your NAS sitting exposed on the internet. Mine sits behind an enterprise security router and has been running for 6 years with only one feature update (backup scheduler). The bigger 5 bay Synology NAS is gathering dust, unused as it sucks a fair bit of power.

Personal preference. I access music stored on our NAS while traveling. Its great to have music to listen to when you're in rural areas with decent cell phone coverage, but lousy radio stations.
 
I just don't get why you'd want any 'apps' on a NAS.

I set up one of those seagate personal cloud NAS for a friend and killed all app rubbish. It was a pain to set up, the updates didn't work (like yours) and what's the point of 'cloud' crap when you've gone and bought a NAS?The last thing you want is your NAS sitting exposed on the internet. Mine sits behind an enterprise security router and has been running for 6 years with only one feature update (backup scheduler). The bigger 5 bay Synology NAS is gathering dust, unused as it sucks a fair bit of power.

While I agree that I didn't really need the personal cloud stuff, and all I really was after was getting my music off my computerso drive, I have found it convenient for sending photos taken from the phone directly to the NAS.

Whether I really use it or not remains to be seen. I could maybe see playing some of my music on my BIL'S $25k stereo when over at his house just by accessing my flac files from home.

For the car I have always found converting a portion of my music library to highest quality mp3 is fine so I likely wouldn't tax my very limited cell data plan by listening to flac from home.
 
I just don't get why you'd want any 'apps' on a NAS.

Some of the apps on the thing are in fact useful. The file-browser is great for moving files from say a USB hard drive to the NAS internal drive without hogging a PC doing it over the network. There's a media server app or two...a bit torrent client....wordpress hosting.

It's targeted more toward people who want to do this kind of stuff geeks have been doing for years...but aren't technically inclined. Most of the "cloud" stuff just mostly services that make it easier to access your stuff without having to remember your IP address..or ports..or anything like that. Calling them "personal clouds" is really kind of a misnomer since cloud computing is something entirely different than what this thing is...which is basically a NAS with embedded OS that has internet functions.

All of my remote access to just about everything on my network is done over a VPN I run my main linux machine. That gets me VNC and RDP access as well.

A couple of years ago when I got my first "4G" phone...maintaining several megabits on this pre-LTE connection was no problem...and the provider had pretty good coverage in 99% of the areas I went. So I needed to figure out a way to be able to stream my music over my "4G" connection from home...which has FiOS. One of my previous methods of getting to stuff when I wasn't at home was just SSHing in to my linux machine and manually copying the file to a temporary http directory; but having gobs of bandwidth and realizing even with FiOS on both ends...trying to pull an entire movie to watch would take some time, I set up a very basic PPTP VPN for being able to access my network shares over SMB/Samba. Complicated media servers? Not on my end. Usually I was pulling to a PC anyway...so I'd just mount the "network share" and access it that way. For the most part I could get Android to play files that way; but it became a pretty ugly solution when network conditions tanked. I actually found a couple pieces of software that would solve my problems.

The first piece of software I already had; Asset UPnP. It's a UPnP/DLNA server, but it's audio-only; and it also costs about $25. I bought it back in 2012 when I had a working Onkyo AVR that did network streaming. Sure, it would stream from SMB; but that didn't solve the issue of unsupported formats like Musepack and the handful of SHN and APE files I haven't converted to flac in my collection. I could set it to send formats my device supported "as-is" and convert the rest to something else. You could even pick default output formats and set up client-specific configurations...so say your main device supports everything but your cheap media player just wants LPCM. This actually wasn't even a feature I used till I got in to streaming to the phone.

The second piece of software I found is for my Android device, UPnPlay. Out of all the UPnP/DLNA clients I tried; this is the only one that will work over LTE. While it's set-up to connect directly to a UPnP server on an open port...that's not even what I cared about, because every other UPnP client would refuse to do anything unless it was on WiFi. So while my UPnP server isn't exposed to the internet...the fact UPnPlay would just try a connection anyway and find the "local" server. But the real kicker was that I didn't even have time to figure out how I could possibly set it up to have say "good bandwidth" and "low bandwidth" configurations; it had this handy-dandy option to change/modify your client header. My server has the option for custom configurations based on client ID!

So what I have is a copy of Asset with multiple configurations I can choose from depending on what "name" I put in my client ID. If I'm on WiFi or really good LTE; I can set it to send everything "as-is" except unsupported formats, which we'll just send at LPCM since it's only 1.441mbps. The second option sends unsupported stuff as MP3. Third option sends all lossy as-is but converts all lossless to MP3. The fourth option is about as conservative as I can get; it forces *everything* to 128kbps MP3; even if it's already MP3. The multi-generational loss can be painful...especially given I have a fixed MP3 rate across all configurations...which I set to 128. I haven't really had to use that option in a long time...I don't often see slow 3G coverage anymore that necessitates such extremes. I mean...I suppose it's possible you could push 128 over a 2G line...but whenever I see that data doesn't work anyway.

I also haven't used it much since getting LTE since my carrier is IPv6 and tunnels IPv4 connections; the PPTP tunnel does not survive tower hand-off.
 
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