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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

#41

Post by rgbrenner »

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…

That has gone to court. They're using the same limitation of liability (including data loss), as-is clause, and waiver of warranties found in every software license. It's entirely enforceable.

Read the TOS. You're not getting anything from them if they delete your data.

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

#42

Post by romwell »

nucleardog wrote: post #30
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 .

By that logic _nothing_ is a backup. A disconnected hard-drive could be lost in a fire, theft, physical damage, you could stop paying your rent and your landlord could repossess it... Telling people that any redundant copy that isn't 100% reliable (i.e., everything) isn't a backup is not a good way to get people to take backups.

This is not correct.

While a hard-drive could be lost in a fire, etc., the state of availability of the data on it is decoupled from that of the system that has the data that's being backed up.

And that's the entire point! Take that as a definition: a backup is a redundant copy whose availability is independent of that of the original.

FYI, from one of the comments below:

>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.

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

#43

Post by ClumsyPilot »

romwell wrote: post #3

There 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…

The most reliable backup avaliable to a common man seems to be burning blueray disks and then posting to different friends/family

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

#44

Post by jbarrs »

jxramos wrote: post #39
munk-a wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Generally I'd recommend using a filesystem designed for that. Something like btrfs or (I think) ZFS, which have checksums built into the filesystem (and if you set them up in a RAID configuration, these checksums can be used to correct data as well)

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

#45

Post by WalterBright »

cmckn wrote: post #31
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.”

Personally, I'm relying on the NSA having backed up all my data.

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

#46

Post by majormajor »

WalterBright wrote: post #38
munk-a wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

If my cloud backup backend provider cancels my account, my backup software will quickly complain. There will be a window of exposure, but I can act quickly.

If my backup harddrive is in the same house as my main storage and my house burns down, I'm fucked.

If I'm fancy, I may have multiple backend storage providers, too. Lot easier to do that then to have multiple houses. I wanted to use a safe deposit box in the past, but last time I called banks near me, they didn't even have safe deposit boxes available to rent! I can ask some friends, but then will be limited in frequency of updates, still.

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

#47

Post by romwell »

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…

I am very sorry to break it to you, but there is no Santa, and you'll be SOL if Dropbox's SLA hits a SNAFU.

Also, from another comment in this thread:

>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.

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

#48

Post by lazide »

TheGuyWhoCodes wrote: post #5
haswell wrote: post #2

Very 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.

QNAp takes the ‘just ship it’ approach. They have a lot of functionality, but it’s clear if you deal with their software much that it was a rush job. Lots of random breakages, bugs, stability issues, etc.

You’re wise to not trust it with anything important.

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

#49

Post by TaylorAlexander »

WalterBright wrote: post #38
munk-a wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

There’s “cloud backup” and there’s “storing everything primarily in one cloud provider”.

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

#50

Post by xattt »

haswell wrote: post #2

Very 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…

I converted a QNAP device to Ubuntu after the updates stopped coming. It’s decent and fits perfectly where it lives in my house.

Of all things, it has a weird boot-up bug where it fails to boot to Ubuntu during about a half-hour period (around :15 and :45) each hour and lands on a kernel panic within a second after grub. I have no idea where to start. Firmware is latest.

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