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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

#61

Post by teejmya »

shric wrote: post #13
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've never tried FreeNAS, but am surprised it took so much maintenance. I've been using FreeBSD with an HP Microserver and ZFS for the same purpose for about 10 years. I just install the updates and everything just works. Curious what kind of maintenance is taking up your time?

I was going to ask the same thing, as someone who's run FreeNAS on the AMD-based HP Microserver for nearly 8 years now.

The only fiddly bit to setup for me was LetsEncrypt auto-renewals, but once I had it automated I never needed to touch it again.

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

#62

Post by romwell »

acchow wrote: post #7
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…

> 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...

>Dropbox allows you to roll back changes and undelete files

What you are saying, is that Dropbox allows you to purchase a backup service from them (without any guarantees, at that).

Cloud sync isn't backup. If someone performs backups on the either side of the cloud, that's great, but that's an extra, which is what I'm saying to begin with :)

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

#63

Post by kova12 »

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 do need some sort of off-site backup for disaster recovery. House can burn down, get burglarized, flooded, and you absolutely must account for that if you really want to mitigate the risk

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

#64

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

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!

Well I guess you should have both. That’s the point point right? Redundancy?

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

#65

Post by ineedasername »

Of course they issue a CYA about their cloud systems not being compromised, but then bury the fact that other systems were compromised by using the passive voice when they point to "threat actors".

I'm assuming the My Books phone home in some way to facilitate file access over the internet. If so, that WD system got cracked. That seems more likely since-- at least for my ISP and I'm guessing most home ISPs-- don't expose individual device ports to the world unless the user sets NAT for that.

Anyone know if NAT configs are required to use the feature that let's you access files from anywhere? If so, someone simply cracked bad security 6 years out of date and scanned for devices.

Given typical IoT security, it might only have been using the default user & password.

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

#66

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

romwell wrote: post #14
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't call it a backup without further clarifications. Like, if it can be killed by the same power surge that takes your main server out, I wouldn't call it a backup . There are a lot of ways to introduce redundancy in the system that would make backups needed much less frequently (if ever). But what a backup does is it allows you to have your data in case your system and accounts are compromised , whether throu…

ANY backup solution can go down with a big enough disaster.

An on-site backup is A backup, but it shouldn't be the ONLY backup. Typically you want a hierarchy of backups, one of which is on-site and on-line but a different machine, another of which is off-site but on-line, and possibly one or more offline backups. But on-line backups are fine, IF (and only if) they're copy-on-write/append-only.

Of course if the data can be deleted or overwritten too soon (even tape drive backup systems have some period over which they start re-using tapes) it's worthless. But that's an entirely separate concern from whether it's always-on or internet-connected or on the same national power grid segment as the original.

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

#67

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

nightfly wrote: post #58
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.

I do both: I backup to my Synology NAS, which then in-turn uses Synology's Hyper-Backup (which is very nice, btw) to my Azure storage account - costs me about $15/mo to store a few terabytes with PITR recovery back to when I started doing this in 2018.

The thing is... I can't help but worry someone's going to compromise my NAS and DBAN the drives and then extract the Azure storage key and use that to delete all my backup blobs...

(Yes, the backup client needs read, write, and delete permissions, unfortunately - and Azure doesn't offer a Blockchain-style "append-only" mode for blob storage, unfortunately - still, better than nothing).

UPDATE: Apparently Azure Blob Storage does support strict append-only blobs that cannot be mutated or deleted, only appended - so I wonder if Hyper-Backup can use that…

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

#68

Post by glenneroo »

wvenable wrote: post #40
WalterBright wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The only downside to cloud backup is the slow restore process.

If you use BackBlaze, they offer multiple options to restore data quicker if you're willing to shell out more money, including AWS or sending you a physical drive with your data on it, albeit the latter is kinda expensive, but if you have a ton of data and need it ASAP, is probably worth the cost.

I recently lost a 16TB drive for the second time in 6 months and my local backups were out of date by a couple months, meaning I needed to restore ~200GB of data. Aside from the web interface file explorer window being cramped (and support telling me to basically go fuck myself after suggesting that), I was able to make ZIP files from recently changed data and use their downloader tool which IMHO is a piece of crap and probably designed by some intern, but at least the download speed was fairly fast, even in Europe, in contrast to upload speeds capped at around 250 KB/s (though thankfully support multiple threads).

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

#69

Post by bombcar »

xattt wrote: post #50
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.

Interesting - is it reliably between those times? What is the panic?

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

#70

Post by haswell »

shric wrote: post #13
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've never tried FreeNAS, but am surprised it took so much maintenance. I've been using FreeBSD with an HP Microserver and ZFS for the same purpose for about 10 years. I just install the updates and everything just works. Curious what kind of maintenance is taking up your time?

For me, the issues were mostly related to the period of time I started using FreeNAS, and getting a bit too creative with plugins and jails.

On the first part, there was a period of time when the project was going through some upheaval (quite a few years ago now) and I had some issues with upgrades.

This goes hand in hand with the 2nd thing - I was trying all sorts of plugins and using it as a BT and newsgroup client. These did not upgrade well.

I suspect that a fresh vanilla build (TrueNAS now) would probable be zero maintenance. I need to upgrade my drives (a bunch of 1TB drives from the era I built it), and I’ll probably use this opportunity to start fresh.

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