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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

#51

Post by pram »

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…

I think this backup maximalism can be taken further. Say if it’s not one of many tapes stored offsite at an Iron Mountain repository, it’s not a backup. Or multiple locations at that, can’t discount redundancy (what if one location gets nuked)

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

#52

Post by ska »

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.

> But not as a backup strategy.

Nonsense. Any robust backup strategy has multiple copies, and multiple locations. Cloud is a sensible component to this.

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

#53

Post by ska »

james_pm wrote: post #34
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.

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

This is often stated as the 3-2-1 rule. At least: 3 copies, 2 different kinds of media, 1 copy offsite.

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

#54

Post by Scoundreller »

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!

And:

4. My crypto exchange disappeared/went bankrupt/was a scam and now my crypto is all gone.

I swear, some people never learn.

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

#55

Post by rsync »

I'm inclined to write off (anyone using a WD "My Book" device) as beyond help but a simple SFTP client like WinSCP or Cyberduck or Filezilla is comprehensible to just about everyone.

You drag and drop to the SFTP destination[1] which covers "History"[2] with immutable ZFS snapshots and "Integrity"[3] with ZFS itself and "Security"[4] by running nothing but OpenSSH.

If you're going to set your parents up with something, you could do worse than that ...

[1] https://www.rsync.net/products/sftp.html

[2] http://taobackup.com/history.html

[3] http://taobackup.com/integrity.html

[4] http://taobackup.com/security.html

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

#56

Post by glenneroo »

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.

It's not stupid but redundancy is important, don't rely on cloud only.

My own anecdata: I lost a couple TBs with Streamload[0] ~2007 when they switched over to MediaMax. They wouldn't admit it was their fault and I never got any kind of compensation - even though I had just renewed my yearly subscription a couple months prior. Thankfully I had offline backups on CD/DVD but that was definitely no fun. More recently CrashPlan decided to no longer offer unlimited backup for non-enterprise users i.e. I would have to pay a LOT more money to back up multiple TBs. At least they offered me a partial refund for the remaining months in my yearly subscription. I really really hope Backblaze keeps their unlimited plan.

As for physical backups, my 8-drive RAID-5 GPT partition got somehow nuked when I was trying out a new Windows 8 installation (one of the first official builds). I never found out what actually caused it, but I immediately went back to Windows 7 and waited for 10 to be out for a couple years before finally switching over. I'm still paranoid and keep my backup server separate and off the network except to make diff backups.

Bit-rot is also becoming a serious issue. I hope to finally build a home ZFS server (with ECC RAM of course) to deal with this, as I've noticed non-streaming encoded videos sometimes just stop working after 15+ years. I'm not sure if it's actually bit-rot but I can't think of anything else that would cause this to happen.

In any case, keep multiple backups: offline and online!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvanix

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

#57

Post by ineedasername »

Discontinued in 2015, so no security patches. That's the problem with all of these purpose built IoT devices, a general lack of security updates even when they're still supported, and of course no chance at all if 6 months or a year after you buy it they decide to drop the product line.

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

#58

Post by nightfly »

rsync wrote: post #55

I'm inclined to write off (anyone using a WD "My Book" device) as beyond help but a simple SFTP client like WinSCP or Cyberduck or Filezilla is comprehensible to just about everyone . You drag and drop to the SFTP destination[1] which covers "History"[2] with immutable ZFS snapshots and "Integrity"[3] with ZFS itself and "Security"[4] by running nothing but OpenSSH. If you're going to set your parents up with somethi…

I backup to cloud (b2, scripts that wrap their CLI tools), but there are lots of reasons to prefer backing up to devices they physically own.

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

#59

Post by xoa »

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

WHAT!? How the heck did you get that conclusion from this story? These are literally your people, who backed up to a local device and essentially chose their own local NAS rather then the cloud. Which unfortunately for them came from a company with bad support that dropped it 6 years ago and likely did a shitty job even before that. But not everyone can be a tech person! Even tech people can't be that knowledgeable about more than a fraction of information technology, the field is crazy vast [0].

The failure modes here are exactly why "cloud" makes so much sense for so many. Keeping stuff up to date, or migrating if the company drops it (even noticing that support has stopped). Securing access. Verifying integrity. Amortizing the cost of different media cold storage fallbacks with things like tape robot facilities. And on and on. You wanna opine a bit on the relative probability that Amazon, Apple, Backblaze, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, rsync.net, or a host of others just "at any moment going dark, for any reason" vs Western fucking Digital My Dropped-in-2015-Book dying? Think carefully.

I mean shit, I actually have a custom Epyc-based TrueNAS Core (not FreeNAS anymore! gotta keep up!) system with tens of terabytes as my main backing store, and replication to a remote site, with more usage of network segmentation, wireguard, ZFS user privileges so compromise of the replication credentials can't delete old stuff, then I'd expect nearly anyone to have any idea about. I still have it going to Backblaze B2 as well, and I pay to have them hang onto it for a year rather then 30 days. And the only reason I can swing it all is that I can amortize a lot of it professionally, get other usage from it, and draw upon a bunch of both knowledge and metaknowledge that my particular life path happens to have granted me.

For 99% of the people in my life "turn on iCloud/Backblaze/whatever" is the right advice. Backups are very risky without heavy automation and regular attention on top.

----

0: One thing working at various levels has given me a deep appreciation for is what broad shoulders I stand upon, many layers deep, and how valuable and deep the knowledge of so many other tradespeople I interact with in life is. The mechanics, electricians, plumbers, general contractors, structural engineers, medical folks, researchers and so on I work with or have worked with all possess skills and knowledge that I never will. That's why we're social animals. I've traded on my skills helping someone improve their network for a hand with skilled carpentry or electrical work or the like. I don't see any shame in that.

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

#60

Post by romwell »

askvictor wrote: post #27
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…

It's more nuanced than that. Many of those things you mention are backups, just not necessarily that reliable for certain threats. By your standards, you'd probably say tapes, removed from their drive, are a backup. Yet, buildings burn down, taking the tapes with them. If restoring backups from off-line, off-site storage is going to take days or weeks, then for some organisations, you may as well not have a backup. C…

I agree with what you say, I'm just nitpicking on differentiating redundancy from backups.

Yes, a building with tapes can burn down. But whether it does so or not is not correlated with the state of the system that the original data lives on.

Redundancy is a great step to prevent data loss. But redundancy won't do what a backup would: keep your data safe even if your system is fucked.

Cloud sync is a double-edged sword, because you make Dropbox a part of your system; their failures are not decoupled from yours anymore. Say, someone hacks into your Dropbox account, encrypts/deletes all data, and then downgrades/cancels your plan so that their backups go poof.

Then you'll find yourself with no data - and no backup.

Compare that to the tape burning down. You just make another tape. The chances of both your system going down, and the tape building having a fire at the same time are astronomically low, because these events are independent.

TL;DR: backups are decoupled, which is why you need them.

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