“I’m totally screwed.” WD My Book Live users wake up to find their data deleted

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Enlarge (credit: Western Digital)

Western Digital, maker of the popular My Disk external hard drives, is recommending customers unplug My Disk Live storage devices from the Internet until further notice while company engineers investigate unexplained compromises that have completely wiped data from devices around the world.

The mass incidents of disk wiping came to light in this thread on Western Digital’s support forum. So far, there are no reports of deleted data later being restored.

All my data is gone

“I have a WD mybook live connected to my home LAN and worked fine for years,” the person starting the thread wrote. “I have just found that somehow all the data on it is gone today, while the directories seems there but empty. Previously the 2T volume was almost full but now it shows full capacity.”

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[M_Six]

This is a pain for these folks and a huge embarrassment for WD. That said, if your data is that crucial, have it backed up on more than one drive system.

 

[harryb2448]

And why leave it permanently attached?

 

[Rod]

With a mains powered external drive of this sort I imagine some people would work directly off the drive itself with just the required applications on their Mac. I remember buying one of these 6-7 years ago for my daughter who had a MacBook with only 250GB of storage. That model merely had a USB connection to her laptop.

The big difference here is that the WD My Book is, as it states, "live". It's essentially an NAS network attached all the time and can also be used to share your locally-stored files through the Internet. Anything stored on the drive can be accessed remotely from other computers, or even from a smartphone. WD says, "and the best part is that you don't need to know anything about how it all works to make it all work."
When you read the promotional stuff about the device it immediately sounds like "putting all your eggs in one basket" so I feel really sorry for the users out there, and there seem to be quite a few, who have lost huge amounts of thier personal data.
It appears, from what I have read, that these devices have been "restored to factory settings" remotely.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

And why leave it permanently attached?

That question is why wouldn't the owner want to do so? A backup device should prioritize the data it is holding and ensure that it doesn't lose it. Especially through a software glitch.

I would propose that most users believe that having their data on a single external storage is sufficient to keep the data safe. More savvy users will ensure to back things up in multiple places or employ a NAS which gives you redundancy built-in.

 

[Slydude]

I think that's exactly what most users are thinking. Even a somewhat save user might not consider the possibility of remote wiping.

 

[MacInWin]

I have two of these. Neither is set up for "cloud" access, I just use them as NAS servers. From my reading, the issue seems to be with devices set up as personal cloud storage, which does require opening them up to Internet access. And, like any device used for storage, they should be backed up somewhere. As mine are.

 

[pjhutch]

I have two WD NAS drives and both are used for backups. They are NOT connected to internet, and are only tuned on when doing the backup and switched off afterwards.