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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

#231

Post by nebula8804 »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #214
rantwasp wrote: post #211

Can't wait for my 3$ as compensation for losing all the data. Seriously now. A class action lawsuit should end with the culprit being out of business in cases of extreme negligence like this one. Anything less just incentivizes them to weight "risk/benefit" of not doing anything

This has never happened before and could seriously ruin the brand. [EDIT: widespread, very public data loss with a remote cause, as a result of a firmware vulnerability in a product whose job is to store data]

What I am seeing is future deep discounts on WD Drives.

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

#232

Post by mpol »

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.

For all my important photos I use par files. Using command-line tools like par2create and par2repair is simply part of the routine of storing photos from the camera on the NAS.

I also use it for music files, in the past too many mp3s got broken.

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

#233

Post by xvector »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #214
rantwasp wrote: post #211

Can't wait for my 3$ as compensation for losing all the data. Seriously now. A class action lawsuit should end with the culprit being out of business in cases of extreme negligence like this one. Anything less just incentivizes them to weight "risk/benefit" of not doing anything

This has never happened before and could seriously ruin the brand. [EDIT: widespread, very public data loss with a remote cause, as a result of a firmware vulnerability in a product whose job is to store data]

I hope it ruins the brand. This sort of incompetence and gross negligence ought to cripple companies.

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

#234

Post by xvector »

cortesoft wrote: post #180
WalterBright wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should trust anything connected to the internet. Demand a physical write-enable switch from your backup drive vendor.

A physical write enable switch? My computer is doing automatic hourly backups, how is that going to work?

Hmm, append-only delta writes?

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

#235

Post by killjoywashere »

This just goes to my general theory that you have very few options:

1) you (inside your walls) are fully NIST 800 series compliant (good luck)

2) you trust Google, Apple and other blue chip companies whose entire brand depends on protecting their user data

3) just accept being a chump

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

#236

Post by IncRnd »

WalterBright wrote: post #160
fallingknife_ wrote: post #125

Read 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 co…

You should trust anything connected to the internet. Demand a physical write-enable switch from your backup drive vendor.

In this particular case, there were My Book drives and My Book Live. When the Live part was configured, you would be creating an entry-point into your network for WD to run code on your drive. I know this, because I purchased one, and read the small getting started guide that came with it.

Needless to say, I never ran any of the Live code. Several of these sorts of things have come up in the industry that always made me recall how happy I was to not have those drives with their backdoors on my network.

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

#237

Post by 8192kjshad09- »

earthboundkid wrote: post #156
zenexer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any single backup is a stupid idea. Combine them, and you've got a great backup solution. Why would I keep important data in one physical location? My house could burn down tomorrow, but I'd still have my cloud backups. My cloud backups could roast in a fire tomorrow, but I'd still have my local backups. And probably several other cloud backups. If you put all your eggs in one backup, sooner or later, you're going to…

He only reliable backup mechanism is starting a successful cult whose main tenet is that your data is valuable communication from God, so that they continually duplicate it. Anything else will go bust long, long before the heat death of the universe.

Amazon just announced AWS Cult-As-A-Service. For the small fee of just $0.05 per Gigabyte per month they will store your data in three separate cults located in geographically distinct regions.

(Data transfer charges not included)

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

#238

Post by xvector »

bigiain wrote: post #130
WalterBright wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dr…

> in exactly the same way that if you care about your backups, a single drive failure will not be a problem

0.85% is extremely high. I've rolled enough 1s on d100s to know that I wouldn't take those odds!

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

#239

Post by Spivak »

thebean11 wrote: post #221
gruez wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What's the point of owning the hardware then, might as well just use Dropbox? Seems like you take on all the risk for essentially no benefit. Dropbox costs $120/year for 2TB. WD live looks to be a one time purchase price for however many terabytes you want.

Hard drives are consumable devices. Dropbox sounds like a better deal considering you get redundancy, don’t need to replace drives when they fail, can recover deleted files for some amount of time (I think)..

This is much much less of a problem for consumer workloads. A pair of hard drives can last a household a decade of moderate use without needing replaced.

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

#240

Post by goatinaboat »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #222
rantwasp wrote: post #211

Can't wait for my 3$ as compensation for losing all the data. Seriously now. A class action lawsuit should end with the culprit being out of business in cases of extreme negligence like this one. Anything less just incentivizes them to weight "risk/benefit" of not doing anything

>should end with the culprit being out of business I would agree if it's non-EoL products. This, not so much. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say since it's EoL WD don't need to do anything. Just that the degree of seriousness of this incident changes with that.

I would agree if't s a non-EoL products. This, not so much.

A company should not be permitted to just declare something “EoL” if it is still in widespread usage. They made it, they support it as long as any customer still has it.

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