Folks, buy 2 similar drives & backup stuff monthly to both & have your local workspace synced to another machine local or cloud using any tool like rsync, Cyberduck, iCloud whatever.
WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
121–130 of 701 posts
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#122Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#123"The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015."
A unpatched in 6 years linux device directly connected to the internet? What could possibly go wrong?
"There is no IoT, there is only the internet of unpatched linux boxes."
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#124Very 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's recent situation was hard to believe. Having only just fixed a significant SQL injection vulnerability[0], a spate of ransomware hit. It was originally announced to be this issue that people rushed out to patch[1]. It ultimately turned out to be a backdoor account[2]. Backdoors really upset me. Every reasonable "you can't blame people for mistakes" goes out the window when it's not a mistake. Following the ran…
Wow. Back door accounts are just totally inexcusable these days - manufacturers should be held to account if their back doors end up getting exploited by threat actors. (Granted, you could argue it’s hard to distinguish between a really terrible bug and a back door, sometimes, but “intent” should cover this difference…)
Would you happen to have a write up/article about this series of events that isn’t a sanitized series of security bulletins? Sounds like it’d make for good reading.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#125Read this, then checked my old My Book Live.
Sure enough... everything's gone.
I just used it for continuous laptop backups over my LAN, so unless one of them crashes tonight, I should be good. But, this will certainly give me pause when considering WD products, and this type of product in particular.
This is very bad, WD! Are your other products also vulnerable in this way? Why should anyone ever again trust your company to keep their data safe?
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are countless systems out there which are far older and also more secure. Age is of zero relevance except to those who propagate forced obolescence, mindless consumption, and generation of massive amounts of e-waste. This "update mentality" is a cancer itself. Especially when this is supposed to be a simple device. That said, relying on the same credentials for a long time is more problematic. My bet is on cred…
Age is of zero relevance for hard drives?
Also - age is of zero relevance to internet connected linux devices?
I rely on many "8-10 year old device that hadn’t received a security update in 6+ years". My coffee machine. My fridge. My hifi. All my motorcycles. None of them run linux and are directly connected to the internet.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
QNAP's recent situation was hard to believe. Having only just fixed a significant SQL injection vulnerability[0], a spate of ransomware hit. It was originally announced to be this issue that people rushed out to patch[1]. It ultimately turned out to be a backdoor account[2]. Backdoors really upset me. Every reasonable "you can't blame people for mistakes" goes out the window when it's not a mistake. Following the ran…
Wow. Back door accounts are just totally inexcusable these days - manufacturers should be held to account if their back doors end up getting exploited by threat actors. (Granted, you could argue it’s hard to distinguish between a really terrible bug and a back door, sometimes, but “intent” should cover this difference…) Would you happen to have a write up/article about this series of events that isn’t a sanitized ser…
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I’m about 3/4 certain that it’s between those times, and never at the top of the hour.
Getting the exact panic would unfortunately mean to have to get it down from the shelf where it lives, and plugging it into a monitor to replicate. It doesn’t make it out of low-res text mode when it does.
Most of the time, I’m usually in a rush to get it back up as my family wants lights and Plex to work normally.
I do my best not to reboot to keep the peace!
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#129There 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 used to do data protection for large enterprises.
I had to explain, at length, to supposedly smart people that there are no time machines.
I've had people state with a straight face that they'll deploy the backup system if they lose some data. As in: afterwards.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#130Earlier 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!
Backblaze's latest drive report shows an annual failure rate for hard drives of 0.85%. I very strongly suspect the total of all failures of the type you're listing there is many orders of magnitude lower than that across all cloud storage users.
If you care about your backups, a single cloud vendor/account vanishing isn't going to be a problem, in exactly the same way that if you care about your backups,m a single drive failure will not be a problem. They are both predictable and mitigable risks.