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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

#81

Post by 3np »

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'd strongly advise someone who is deciding between buying an external hard drive or using a third party for backup to use the third party

One does not safely rely on one third party for backups. You should do both the local drive and the remote, not one or the other.

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

#82

Post by WalterBright »

glenneroo wrote: post #56
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 compen…

> bit rot

Hard disk drives go on sale regularly. I replace mine usually once a year or so. They're not expensive relative to the loss of the data. I just bought a 500G SSD drive on sale for $60.

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

#83

Post by exporectomy »

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…

My backup drive has a physical switch. I used to be meticulous in setting it to read-only except while making a backup. But now I just leave it in read/write mode because I lost my enthusiasm. It's not plugged in when not in use though, so it's a bit safer from this sort of thing.

How would you do automated backups with a physical switch? Are you proposing nobody does automated daily or more frequent backups?

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

#84

Post by 3np »

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…

I was with you through the rest of the thread until here, but this is too extreme. By your definition there does not exist such a thing as an in-site backup, does there?

Take it to the extreme and everything is connected somehow at some point, thereby making a True Backup by your definition physically impossible, even off-site. The point where the backup is made could have a zero-day propagate to the tape machine, killing it and the tape by spinning up the motors. A blueray drive could have the firmware pwned.

If not even incremental snapshots synced to a remote count as backups, you are probably the only one to harbor this interpretation of the word and it arguably loses its usefulness as a word.

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

#85

Post by crackercrews »

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…

> 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!

Yep, I once reformatted the wrong drive. I plugged in a firewire drive into a friend's Mac and didn't realize he had an internal drive that apparently also showed up with a firewire icon. Whoops!

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

#86

Post by crackercrews »

WalterBright wrote: post #82
glenneroo wrote: post #56

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. 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 compen…

> bit rot Hard disk drives go on sale regularly. I replace mine usually once a year or so. They're not expensive relative to the loss of the data. I just bought a 500G SSD drive on sale for $60.

Do people buy SSDs for backup purposes? Sure it's fast, but isn't it better to get 6x the storage for the same price?

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

#87

Post by exporectomy »

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!

I think you've fallen into the trap of being scared by the news. Normal hard drive failures don't make it to HN because they're so boring and common. You even had one yourself. That's how unreliable maintaining your own backup device is.

This very story is just that - people had their own hard drive and it wasn't maintained for security so it got erased. At least this article needs to be added to your mental list of failures of local storage to balance your news-driven bias.

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

#88

Post by WalterBright »

glenneroo wrote: post #71
WalterBright wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good luck getting them to a) admit they have it and b) send you a copy ;)

As a taxpayer, aren't I entitled to a restore? :-)

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

#90

Post by koolba »

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…

> 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!

Reminds me of the little sliders on memory cards. Though I think those were software driven. It didn’t actually lock it out from writing.

Are there any portable USB style disks that have a hardware enforced read only switch?

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