"I have a WD MyBook live connected to my home LAN and worked fine for years. I have just found that somehow all the data on it is gone today. While the directories seem there but empty. Previously the 2T volume was almost full but now it shows full capacity."
It’s not the only case the WD Mybook files are deleted. You can see many people are post threads in WD forums, telling it happened to their WD Mybook as well. The data were deleted by a factory reset on their device.
And one person posted a log showing the factory reset performance on June 23rd.
What to do when all the files are deleted on My Book? What did WD official say?
The official said they were investigating the issue and they’ve confirmed an attack. But the only effective way to avoid it happen to other My Book devices is to disconnect My Book Live devices from the internet. See the information from Western Digital officials.
As what the official said, the first thing to do is to disconnect your My Book with the internet. If you have lost files by the factory reset, get the data recovery software for help. You can try iBeesoft Data Recovery, a professional data recovery to scan your My Book Live Devices for free, displaying the recoverable files for you. Here are the main features for iBeesoft Data Recovery for your reference.
Connect the WD My Book Live device with your computer, making sure it is recognized as an external hard drive on your computer. And do not try to find anything there manually or do any transfer.
Click the download button to get the installation package of the data recovery software. You can either get the Windows version or Mac version. It fully depends on your computer OS. Install it on your computer.
Launch the best hard drive recovery software. In the first window, you can click "Start" directly. If you want to scan for one of more file types in priority, then deselect other files. In the next step, please select the WD My Book Live Device and click "Scan".
When the scanning process is finished, all the recoverable files are displayed there. You can select file types and files to preview. When find the target files, select them and click "Recover" to save them on your computer. please note not save in the My Book Device, but in your computer, to avoid data loss.
Note: iBeesoft Data Recovery is free to scan for recoverable files. If you want to recover selected files, please update to the full version.
To be honest, WD is one of the most trusted hard drives and hard drive service providers. It really shocked people this time that their data lost in this way. Files are important, and sometimes they are recoverable, and sometimes you can’t recover them at all. You should always remember what you should do and what to do to prevent data loss.
1. Stop using the hard drive when you find files are deleted or lost. Any further action on the hard drive will cause the files overwritten issue, making the recoverable files deleted permanently.
2. Get a trust data recovery software tool on your computer to recover the lost or deleted from the hard drive. It will increase the chances of data recovery success rate.
3. Do the backup regularly if you have important files. You can get several copies, putting them on your computer, USB flash drive, or any other hard drive manually. If it is troublesome for you to do the backup manually, get a backup software tool for help, like iBeesoft Dbackup. You just schedule the backup and it will do the rest for you in the background.
4. Try your best to not using cloud services. Nobody can ensure there will be no problem of storing the files and sometimes any sync will cause data all modified remotely.