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This isn’t a drive he purchased many months or years ago — it’s the supposedly safe replacement that Western Digital recently sent after his original wiped his data all by itself.
SanDisk issued a firmware fix for a variety of drives in late May, shortly after our story.
But data recovery services can be expensive, and Western Digital never offered Vjeran any the first time it left him out to dry.
Honestly, it feels like WD has been trying to sweep this under the rug while it tries to offload its remaining inventory at a deep discount — they’re still 66 percent off at Amazon, for example.
Unfortunately, the broken state of the internet means Western Digital doesn’t have to work very hard to keep selling these drives.
I’d also like to say shame on CNET, Cult of Mac and G/O Media’s The Inventory for writing deal posts about this drive that don’t warn their readers at all.
We had the same problem here in our company. Don’t use theirs drives.
WD writing fake reviews?
There’s no way an actual human wrote such an extensive, detailed but overall dry of content as a review, unless they got it for free in exchange of an enthusiastic review
Edit: the article shows screenshots of clearly fake reviews on Amazon from “verified” buyers. This is what I’m referring to fake reviews
What the hell are you talking about? Consider reading the actual article before commenting something snarky. WD owns SanDisk, and this article is shitting all over them.
Here’s a short version if you can’t be bothered: It’s a follow-up to this article from May where they reported on a bug in SanDisk firmware that erased your data. WD claims to have fixed it with an update, but that appears to be false. The fact that these drives with a high failure rate are also being sold with a deep discount makes it seem like WD/SanDisk is just trying to get rid of defective hardware as quickly as possible while minimizing dollars lost, at the expense of your data.
They were talking about the reviews featured in the article. Did you read it?
In case anyone is in a similar situation, I can’t say enough good things about PhotoRec. It saved my ass more than once from hard drive recovery down to SD cards.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Yeah, yeah, it’s command line only, but once you get your stuff back it’s worth learning!
NOTHING I have that is irreplaceable is on less than 2 drives nor are they ever connected at the same time. You’re just asking to lose files if you only save them on one drive.
Until the backups don’t work.
Untested backups can hold all sorts of surprises.
Sadly, testing backups is a lot of work and is rarely done.
Deja Dup has a nice feature in that every once in a while is spawns and verifies that the backup is retrievable
Not your problem… until the hosting provider publishes a press release about some recent fire or flooding in the data center that “only impacted less than 1% of our customers”… and you turn out to be among them.
For “super important” stuff, I keep closer to 10 copies spread around in different places. Normal stuff is 321, and everything else is temporary.
If you have your data in one location, you have your data in zero locations.
The 3 2 1 of data retention is important
3 copies of your data
2 local
1 off-site
The 2 stands for on 2 different mediums. So HDD and tape for instance. Or HDD and SSD. Or SSD and DVDs. Whatever combo you choose that fits your needs. This (minimizes) the chance of loss of both.
I’d love to use tape but so far couldn’t bring myself to make the Jump cause of the upfront cost of the drive. Other than that it would sound great to have tapes of my digitized bluray collection so as if my nas should fail unrecoverably, I could simply setup a new one and copy back the data instead of having to digitize everything again.
I know a lot of people who put their single copy of files on USB drives “for safety”
But in the case of the article looks like it was video shot and saved directly from the camera (professional cameras like the blackmagic save directly on USB SSDs), so there wasn’t time to backup it
I know a lot of people who put their single copy of files on USB drives “for safety”
But in the case of the article looks like it was video shot and saved directly from the camera (professional cameras like the blackmagic save directly on USB SSDs), so there wasn’t time to backup it
Looking at Blackmagic’s pro-level cameras, they support external USB storage and dual SD Cards and dual CFast cards.
So there’s certainly no requirement to use external USB storage.
But, they also say:
When shooting is complete you can simply move the external disk to your computer and start editing from the same disk, eliminating file copying!
Rather unfortunate advice.
