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WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

arstechnica.com

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Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#31

Post by cmckn »

WalterBright wrote: post #23

> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…

Cloud backups are just one layer of a robust backup strategy. A copy on your desk, one in your closet, one at your parents, one in Backblaze, one in Glacier, etc.

“It’s not a backup until you restore it.”

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#32

Post by cma »

munk-a wrote: post #20
romwell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...if you pay for it, and if your account doesn't get hacked, and if nothing goes wrong on Dropbox's side, and... That's to say, Dropbox is not a backup .

I don't know if this has gone to court yet - but I'd assume that if Dropbox does a thing to delete a bunch of data that causes you a great loss of value when you're paying them specifically to store a bunch of data - then there would be enough of an implied contract in place that you could extract a bunch of pain from them regardless of what their TOS tries to say. The law is complicated and the details are extremely…

Then people irresponsibly storing single copies of critical data on Dropbox raise the cost for more responsible users, because upon loss Dropbox has to pay out the high value of the loss to the irresponsible user, but pay next to nothing to the reponsible users, who already have multiple backups or store less critical data.

It should at least be a tiered offering with different liability caps.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#33

Post by jpeloquin »

romwell wrote: post #12
acchow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

...if you pay for it, and if your account doesn't get hacked, and if nothing goes wrong on Dropbox's side, and... That's to say, Dropbox is not a backup .

I think it is correct that, without unusual precautions, Dropbox should not be counted as a distinct backup copy for satisfying the 3-copies rule. I've "lost" (had to restore from personal backup drives) data from Dropbox due to an error made by their support staff during a mass rollback, which was itself needed due to the Dropbox client interpreting a drive disconnection as a mass file deletion. (This was before they implemented mass rollback through the UI; it's a safer process now.) And this is fine. Dropbox does file synchronization, which means it propagates data loss as well as intentional changes.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#34

Post by james_pm »

wvenable wrote: post #28
WalterBright wrote: post #23

> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…

You must have multiple copies of data. Assume you always have one less copy than you actually have. Drives fail for any number of reasons. Cloud backup is perfectly fine as long as it's one of those copies -- I cloud backup my desktop and it saved me from a lot of loss.

Three copies or it doesn't exist. At least one should be elsewhere from the other two.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#35

Post by WalterBright »

wvenable wrote: post #28
WalterBright wrote: post #23

> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…

You must have multiple copies of data. Assume you always have one less copy than you actually have. Drives fail for any number of reasons. Cloud backup is perfectly fine as long as it's one of those copies -- I cloud backup my desktop and it saved me from a lot of loss.

Cloud storage is convenient, as one can then access it from any device. It's great to use as a temporary backup when traveling.

But not as a backup strategy.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#36

Post by ClumsyPilot »

WalterBright wrote: post #23

> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…

"Cloud backup is a stupid idea. At any moment it could go dark, for any reason, and you have no recourse."

If you are aware of the issue, and get kicked off AWS, or whatever, you move the backup. It is only a problem if your data catxhes fire and you get removed from cloud at the same time

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#37

Post by crazysim »

munk-a wrote: post #18
grrowl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article mentions that a factory reset was performed on the devices. Factory resets usually leave the data in a readable state depending on how paranoid the developers coding them are - you're not usually going to run shred -n 11

I don't know whether to hope the factory reset resets by keys erasure or not. If it doesn't, the affected users stand a chance for recovery.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#38

Post by WalterBright »

munk-a wrote: post #26
WalterBright wrote: post #23

> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…

> Cloud backup is a stupid idea. At any moment it could go dark, for any reason, and you have no recourse. Might as well bare your throat and hand some random stranger a razor. I really disagree - physical storage in your home is the common alternative for a lot of consumer users - and that physical storage will involve maybe unplugging your external hard drive between backups - but otherwise never checking for the c…

> cloud backups are likely going to be more reliable

I've seen enough HackerNews articles:

1. My account got deleted and I can't find a human to talk to and all my pictures going back 20 years are gone!

2. A hacker guessed my password and deleted my online presence! It's all gone!

3. My storage provider went bust and all my stuff is gone!

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#39

Post by jxramos »

munk-a wrote: post #26
WalterBright wrote: post #23

> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…

> Cloud backup is a stupid idea. At any moment it could go dark, for any reason, and you have no recourse. Might as well bare your throat and hand some random stranger a razor. I really disagree - physical storage in your home is the common alternative for a lot of consumer users - and that physical storage will involve maybe unplugging your external hard drive between backups - but otherwise never checking for the c…

do you know of any tools for consistency/accuracy? I've been meaning to do some basic md5 checks for all my files but haven't gotten around to it. Every now and then I find a corrupt jpg image that has a rectangular band running through it or something of the like.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#40

Post by wvenable »

WalterBright wrote: post #35
wvenable wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have multiple copies of data. Assume you always have one less copy than you actually have. Drives fail for any number of reasons. Cloud backup is perfectly fine as long as it's one of those copies -- I cloud backup my desktop and it saved me from a lot of loss.

Cloud storage is convenient, as one can then access it from any device. It's great to use as a temporary backup when traveling. But not as a backup strategy.

Why not as a backup strategy? I had my desktop harddrive fail and while I had some local backups but the cloud backup restored me to almost the minute of the failure. The only downside to cloud backup is the slow restore process.
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