WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
arstechnica.com
WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
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Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#2Very interested to see what the root cause ends up being - this is mind bogglingly bad. I know several people who use these devices because of their simplicity, and they’d be devastated.
I run a FreeNAS setup at home on an HP MicroServer. From time to time, I lament the amount of time I’ve spent over the years maintaining it, and after a recent drive failure (and wishing for more performance), I started considering consumer options like Synology/QNAP.
Articles like this always give me pause, and remind me why I invest the time I do to maintain my own thing. I’d rather fuck something up myself than fall victim to an issue like this, and the time spent setting it up likely pales in comparison to dealing with data recovery.
I really hope these users can get their data back.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#3There are two kinds of users: those who back up their data, and those who haven't experienced a data loss yet.
This is your daily reminder that anything that's connected is not a backup.
Yes, that includes the hard drive in your machine. For that matter, RAID is not a backup solution.
Yes, that includes cloud sync (Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive/etc) that propagates changes automatically. That's not backup.
And that includes WD My Book, as it (unsurprisingly) turns out.
Take this as a PSA.
If you want to be more enlightened: http://www.taobackup.com/
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#4Sounds like its affecting people using the My Book live service to access it over the internet
Just wow though... Hopefully its not actually doing something like overwriting the data with random bits and just deleting the pointers to the file in the MFT. If the latter case, the data can be easily recovered
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#5Very interested to see what the root cause ends up being - this is mind bogglingly bad. I know several people who use these devices because of their simplicity, and they’d be devastated. I run a FreeNAS setup at home on an HP MicroServer. From time to time, I lament the amount of time I’ve spent over the years maintaining it, and after a recent drive failure (and wishing for more performance), I started considering c…
Qnap had a lot of security issues in the past, like unpatched RCE and backdoors. I wouldn't recommend, (and never ever use qnap cloud or upnp) as it seems they don't really do a good job on software QA or penetration testing or security audits.
Hardware is fine but it's much more expensive than just building it yourself.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#6There are two kinds of users: those who back up their data, and those who haven't experienced a data loss yet. This is your daily reminder that anything that's connected is not a backup . Yes, that includes the hard drive in your machine. For that matter, RAID is not a backup solution. Yes, that includes cloud sync (Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive/etc) that propagates changes automatically. That's not backup. And that includ…
A Copy-On-Write Append-Only system CAN be a backup, even if connected. But that takes a lot more storage space, so it's more expensive.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#7There are two kinds of users: those who back up their data, and those who haven't experienced a data loss yet. This is your daily reminder that anything that's connected is not a backup . Yes, that includes the hard drive in your machine. For that matter, RAID is not a backup solution. Yes, that includes cloud sync (Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive/etc) that propagates changes automatically. That's not backup. And that includ…
> Yes, that includes cloud sync (Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive/etc) that propagates changes automatically
Dropbox allows you to roll back changes and undelete files
https://www.dropbox.com/features/cloud-storage/file-recovery...
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#8Sounds like its affecting people using the My Book live service to access it over the internet Just wow though... Hopefully its not actually doing something like overwriting the data with random bits and just deleting the pointers to the file in the MFT. If the latter case, the data can be easily recovered
I would hope (but I do not expect) Western Digital to recover the data for the end users. This is a really bad situation for some.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#9It may sound a little unfair, but the MyBook has been on my personal Ban List for 14 years now. (has it been that long?)
I don't know if they still do this, but there was a time their NAS would refuse to allow access to MP3 files over a network. To fight piracy.
https://www.theregister.com/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_c...
(Was www.wired.com/2007/12/western-digital)
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#10My money is on "hardcoded admin backdoor password leaked".
Edit: Found the manual[1]
"Changing a User’s Password: When viewing details about a user, the Administrator can change the user’s password (no password is the default setting)."
Oof.
[1] https://media.flixcar.com/f360cdn/Western_Digital-905161691-...