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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Western Digital Dropping Support for Discovery Desktop App

February 7, 2023

A lot of users have external hard drives to backup their computers or add needed storage. Western Digital (WD) makes a model called My Cloud. If you own a My Cloud drive, WD will force you to manually enable local access to the drive according to a Review Geek post. The Discovery Desktop app will stop receiving updates in June of 2023. It may continue to work after the cutoff date, but will certainly break at some point. Even though WD is dropping support, users will have to manually enable local network access to get to the stored data. Here are the steps to follow:

  • Enable UPnP on Your Router
  • Sign into My Cloud Dashboard
  • Enable Local Network Access
  • Create SMB Login
  • Get On Your Computer

It’s a pretty messy process. Enabling UPnP is a show stopper for me. UPnP is typically enabled by default, despite the security risk. I would rather purchase a new external drive and not open a potential security hole by turning on UPnP.

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