WD My Book Duo RAID1 WARNING!

I ran into some serious issues with my WD My Book Duo RAID hard drive. It was working perfectly fine but then one day it was unmounted from the desktop and I couldn't see it with Disk Utility. The drive had disappeared from my operating system with no way to access the files. Was it a failed enclosure? Was there some weird WD encryption to blame? Here's what I discovered.
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[@seagullstoriesbylucya.faze9723]

THANK YOU! Spent hours with WD chat and DELL support going in circles trying to get my WD MyBook Duo set up. WD chat was USELESS! Watching your video showed me that I needed to download the WD Drive Utilities. The product came with NO INSTRUCTIONS and the online manual was useless. I now have it configured after almost 8 hours of being jerked around. Thank you!

[@tommccurnin524]

Good Video, Good Information As a long time RAID user with years of experience with failed hard drives, I would recommend that users do the following 1. WD My Book Duos Are Good Units, But Hard Drives Fail. Prepare for failure. 2. RAID1 Is Not a Backup System. All RAID1 does is provide a one disk failure tolerance, e.g., if one disk in the enclosure fails, then the 2nd disk should be recoverable. If the whole enclosure fails or the Mac file structure is unstable, then you are FUBAR. 3. Backup Using the 3-2-1 Rule. Three Backups, two onsite, and one offsite. I find it hard to believe that an IT guy like this uploader only had one, a single copy of his important personal data. That is a rookie mistake. For around $10 per month, many companies offer unlimited cloud storage. Oh, and I have made that mistake too, by the way. 4. Consider Using a NAS for Backup (Network Available Storage). There are some good ones out there, and they utilized your network accessible through your LAN by a Cat5 hooked to your switch or router. RAID0 and Raid1 are both options. Synology is a well accepted brand, but is not easy to set up. Again, a NAS is only part of a backup plan (3-2-1), so one always has four copies of everything. This is a really good video, well presented and I was impressed by the uploader's ability to problem solve.

[@ghumuland2604]

Hi Tom, thanks for sharing your knowledge. Which unlimited cloud storage would you recommend?

[@IvanIvoMartinetti]

I am familiar with this problem. Amazingly I came up with a super easy solution. I connected the hard drives to a Windows PC which immediately recognized that one of the drives had an error and offered me to scan and fix it. After clicking on "Fix it" button the drive was scanned and corrected and started working again. I connected it back to my MacBook Pro it was working. This happened at least 3 times and now watching your video I am realizing that exFat is probable cause. Thank you, I will reformat them too

[@BlenderRookie]

Sorry to break this to you but it's not an exfat issue. These duo enclosures have hardware accelerated encryption. Which is a nice thing. However, if you routinely do a lot of large file transfers, the chip on the board in the enclosure that's responsible for encrypting as it writes to the disks and decrypting as it reads from the disks, will overheat and wearout because there is no heatsink whatsoever on the chipset. As the chip starts to fail, your enclosure or individual disks in the enclosure will dismount sporadically. Furthermore, if the chip overheats during a file transfer, the file might finish transferring but the data will be unreadable. On top of that, due to the fact that each chip has a unique encryption algorithm, if the chip or enclosure fails, you cannot simply remove the discs and read them even in another duo enclosure. All the data will be lost, albeit the disks can be reallocated in a partition manager but again all data is lost. To make matters worse, even if your data is intact but encrypted and thereby still unreadable, WD will not let you know what the decryption key is that will allow you to recover the data via software decryption. Why would WD not provide that? I can only assume they are sacrificing their current customer's satisfaction for security and also because WD made deals with certain data recovery firms to provide them access to the decryption keys for profit in a croney kinda way. The good news is, for people who do not do a lot of large file transfers(I'm taking GBs at a time), these enclosures and their encryption chips will last years and years. The easiest way to overheat the encryption chip and eventually kill it is to transfer data to or from the enclosure in TB amounts non stop. That will kill the chip in less than a year.

[@devotee]

Good point but are you sure about that? He says that after "recovering" the WD My Book Duo (by reformatting it using HFS+J) he tried to take out the drives from the enclosure and test them on a Mac with a different external enclosure and he could read each of them fine (09:38). Maybe the encryption is optional when configuring the My Book Duo or what you explained only happens on new models (I noticed that this video is 2 years old and your comment is more recent)?

[@edukeren]

i think he test it in other mybook dou still same type and brand

[@edwardcullen3251]

If it was the chip that got fried, surely it wouldn't have worked again as he says it did?

[@kylebiggs8849]

@@edwardcullen3251 Perhaps the encryption is unique to each enclosure?

[@Director414]

I´m working from my WD Duo drive, doing video editing. Will this burn my WD duo? My projects are about 200-300 GB, but once transferred to my DUO I from there.. not transferring anything back and forth so to speak

[@The17alex23]

Backup your data! Just cause you’re running in a RAID configuration doesn’t mean you don’t need backups. You still have a single point of failure which would be the enclosure

[@agnessaspichka5904]

I'm so glad I came across this video! Sorry for the loss of your files. I would be devastated if I lost my personal projects :(

[@CHICANO1975]

Good info., but you probably could've told us all that in 3-5 mins

[@donaldjackson968]

He was building suspense broski

[@Kainthemain]

damn annoying when they just lengthen this shit

[@jasongairn]

Should have read comments first. I got caught too. Plus it’s for Mac users not PC.

[@questiongod6303]

He should apologize

[@paulyster]

I don't know. I appreciate the troubleshooting and his personal experiences.

[@Springer5]

Everyone is talking about exFAT (in isolation) but, given the "it's apple's way or the highway" nature apple devices I suspect it is far more likely to be an apple problem with the apple devices corrupting exFAT (specifically) formats. i'm guessing that there are millions of Mybook Duos out there happily using exFAT with other OSs. It's just with apple that the incompatibility shows up. It is interesting that someone else here has commented how their Windows PC identified the error and fixed it. This implies to me that Apple's inability (unwillingness?) to "play nice" with anything not proprietry is at the heart of this. So the moral of the story for me is..... Good video and very well presented. Well done for potentially saving others a lot of grief.

[@misterheavy2296]

Thank you for a very useful, well considered and informative posting. Confirmed my suspicions about exfat. I have a 12TB mybook duo which was formatted exfat but it went awol so I reformatted it as HFS+j about a week after I got it. I must agree about their software - reports "errors" and then dumps you, stranded, with nowhere to go.- Tear the thing apart and re-fomrat, with data lost.

[@CIAMasterControl]

The issue isn't exFAT itself. The issue is that Apple does a poor job implementing industry standards, as it wants its customers confined to its walled garden as much as possible. But as the video shows, if you are going to use Apple products, you should probably stick with Apple's internal standards like HFS+, despite its shortcomings, such as the lack of checksums. Linux can read & write HFS & HSF+ volumes, and commercial products like MacDrive for Windows allows Windows systems to also read, write & repair HFS & HSF+ volumes.

[@lmacatol]

This happened to me a few months ago and I landed in this video. My My Book Duo was also exfat. Just today, I decided to change the power source... I took my cord from my LED production lights and bam! It works again. I think it needed more power, it's the only thing I can think of.

[@phil_aus701]

6:20 Just here as a reminder for myself if I ever need to watch this bit again, don't mind me

[@shyrochanning5851]

WD 28 TB My Book Duo Desktop Raid USB 3.1 External Hard Drive & Auto Backup Software, in Black... Is what I've bought. But I haven't even unboxed it yet, much less formatted the duel drives. So a big thanks going out to you, for this warning!

[@NathanCarroll_SLB]

Thank you for sharing! I'm glad I found this before I configured my new drive.

[@RicardoJimenezCR]

Hey I've just solved a similar issue! After much research and trying different things, I removed one of the hard drives and booted the My Book Duo with only 1 hard disk and plugged into my PC. It now had 2 red lights (a flashing power red light and a solid HD red light on the missing drive) but it was totally recognized by my PC and I could access all files and info! If you are having this issue this is worth a try!

[@_tographer]

Great to know for those with access to a PC. Thanks for the tip!

[@matthewherrmann474]

After your suggestion I tried the same thing (removing 1 HD) and plugged it into my mac and it worked! Thank you!!

[@RicardoJimenezCR]

@@matthewherrmann474 yeahh!!!!

[@npr1300A8]

I don't have a Mac however I do have a MyCloud device with RAID, however I found your video very helpful. Ignore these negative comments about length of your video.

[@_tographer]

Thanks!

[@toyuniverses]

I just had a problem with my MyBook Duo, which suddenly failed and became inaccessible (I'm also on Mac). Unmounting the drive and cycling its power brought it back online, but then it soon reported that one drive had failed. I actually think it had just overheated because I was writing data to it constantly for several hours, but now I'm replacing the "failed" disk (with a non-SMR WD Red Plus of the same capacity). I use the duo in RAID1 for availability, but I back it up to another disk and also online to BackBlaze (which I highly recommend). As several people here have stressed, RAID is *not* backup. If you have a software problem, or delete something accidentally, RAID does not provide an extra copy to recover from.

[@steveg6199]

Thanks for confirming an issue that I suspected was the problem with a 3TB WD Essentials external drive that I bought back in 2012 and tried to "resurrect" in 2019. I had formatted it exFAT in order to have a Mac user transfer a bunch of graphics files onto it for me to view on a PC (running Win7 OS). It had worked back then for about 2 years... then I didn't touch it again until 2019. Connected the USB to the PC and Windows 10 did not FULLY recognize the external hard drive (the icon popped-up in the devices area once connected, but NO FILES were detected in Windows Explorer). I tried reformatting it, but that option was greyed-out as if the drive was a corrupted flash disk. So now it's in an E-Waste bin out of my life. I'm thinking of getting the one that you showed in the video though.

[@milohajek]

I am a CIS-System Administrator, not a bad job but you could have explained it all in about 2-5 minutes

[@uzefulvideos3440]

The problem: exFAT does not support journaling. The fix: Plug the corrupted hard drive in a Windows machine (note the letter the drive gets assigned -> G), open the command line and run chkdsk G: /f The solution: Don't use exFAT. If you want cross-platform compatibility, choose NTFS. EDIT: Just realised that macOS doesn't support NTFS...

[@michalwiktorow2188]

Yes it does, you need to buy Paragon NTFS driver.

[@CRSolarice]

...exFAT is a non-journaling filesystem. In other words there is no way for the file system to recover files if something goes wrong. Jounrnaling filesystems keep certain bits of information about the files in case there is a problem and then an operating system can use that information to recover the files if there is a problem; non-journaling file systems can have certain benefits. IOS is sensitive to problems with exFAT but the data is NEVER lost until you either fiddle around and do the wrong thing or format the drive. The solution is to connect the drive to a windows system and run chkdsk /f (SUPER-RECOMMEND, IN THE EVENT OF ANY PROBLEM WITH DATA ON A HARD DRIVE, TO CLONE THE DRIVE FIRST JUST IN CASE). There is another solution and that is prevent the issue to begin with; likely caused by an improper shutdown (just turned the computer or drive off) or if you aren't aware of that occurring then likely it was a power failure or brief "blip" while you weren't there. I recommend, highly, that you connect anything related to a computer or data to an UPS (uninterruptible power supply). Just remember, the data on a failed drive is never gone until YOU make it gone. Its always so painful watching people who don't know a lot about computers trying to solve bugs and issues but I do have compassion and will do as much to help them as possible...

[@Jessethetico]

You’re right man. It’s super difficult finding a solution for an unmountable Mybook Duo online and WD is useless when it comes to support. My drive wouldn’t mount but was visible in Disk Utilities so I opened WD drive utilities and as I was doing the quick drive test it magically showed up on my desktop. I have no idea what solved the problem but I’m glad to have my info back. Definitely will stay away from EXFat

[@marsdahustler]

long ass story. literally could have summed it up in 2 minutes.

[@francescomaurodeledda3642]

you right

[@AnthonyNogales]

I'm glad this was the top comment in my view because I literally had the thought, "This guy sure loves the sound of his voice. Christ... No pun intended."

[@edstar83]

time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/

[@ilusions4]

@@edstar83 irrelevant to the fact that this video didn't need to be as long as it was. guy was just milking watch time

[@BenTheBax]

This experience is very valuable. I am also in this problem as I us my WD Mypassport as exFAT and one day it just disappeared from either Mac and PC. So I tried to googled and did a lots of research and I found nothing. Anyway, thanks to shared your experience and solution. All the best!

[@alexandreviguie9635]

Very interesting video, I have a WD MyBook Duo for a couple of years and very often I am getting RAID configuration errors that I fix by removing power and putting it back again (the power button is not a physical switch). I am using this drive with a Mac and I formatted it as APFS with RAID 0. I was having the project to re-format it as another filesystem as I suspected APFS was the reason of the issue, and your video is kind of confirming I should try another filesystem (not ExFat after your experience)! I can't say for sure that APFS is also a problem for this device but... Thanks for your video!

[@marditoon1128]

Great Video because i was looking at a 44 TB western digital to buy and even though this video is old it still relates to my potential purchase. Thank you very much👊🏻👊🏻

[@markostertag1101]

Using one of these devices is good, but YOU HAVE TO BACKUP THE RAID DEVICE ITSELF. I believe RAID devices are more meant for convenience of use than full blown backup solutions. You can back them up to an attached USB device, a cloud backup, or another My Cloud device (assuming your device supports these options). Also, rather than buying many of these MyBook Duos, you could get bigger My Cloud devices, like a PR4100 with 32TB, etc. Then you could run two of them and back them up to each other, therefore you would have only two devices instead of 12, but they would still be redundant to each other. It might makes things simpler. Side note: I'm a network guy, I would have been interested if you looked in your router or used a program like PingInfoView to ping your whole network subnet, to see if that MyBookDuo was still online but at a different IP or just locked up or whatever. Sounds like it was just down, given your story, but I would have also checked that. Lastly, I was wondering if there is a way to check what type of file format was used in setting up the system? I have a My Cloud Mirror and I can't remember what file format I selected... if I was even given that option... because honestly I don't remember that part. I just setup a My Cloud PR4100 yesterday and don't remember that option with that device either. Maybe this is more related to the MyBook Duo's?

[@stevehascall4441]

Exactly right, RAID is not a backup. If data is valuable, back it up.

[@alphaxion]

Always remember: RAID is not backup, it's resiliency. When using RAID 1 and onwards it's about being able to take drive failure without losing the dataset, it won't help you if you delete a file or if it becomes corrupt or you wish to revert to a prior version of a file.

[@youneedabasslift]

alpha xion Would you care to suggest a backup solution rather than patronising those with less knowledge than you then?

[@daltonrandall4348]

Of course RAID is a backup, what nonsense.

[@alphaxion]

@@daltonrandall4348 It's not a backup, largely because there's no historical data. If the data in your RAID array is corrupted you've lost that data. It is purely for resiliency should any drives in your array fail. I hope you're not IT for where you work, because if you rely on RAID as a backup you have no backup.

[@daltonrandall4348]

@@alphaxion That's like saying if a nuclear bomb goes off at the super secure bank vault where you've stored your backup, you've lost that data. Of course if the backup gets destroyed you lose the backup... you're stating the obvious.

[@mrscreamer379]

So you at no point realizing it was on exfat, tried to use a Windows PC to see the drive? Jees, mac users.

[@uzefulvideos3440]

​@kryptoday exFAT doesn't support journaling, so the filesystem can get corrupted when the drive loses power during a write process. On Windows the file system can be repaired by running `chkdsk X: /f` or `chkdsk X: /r` (with "X" being the volume letter of the affected drive). Windows normally recognizes the corrupted filesystem itself and asks if it should check and repair the affected drive when you plug it in. As far as I know repairing a corrupted exFAT file system is not possible on other operating systems.

[@jarhead4657]

@kryptoday It's because he's an idiot.

[@andywhiteing]

Well I am having this exact issue. Now after watching 15 min video I still have no idea how to recover my files on the WD Duo? Thanks.

[@seerstoneent]

That happened with a Lacie drive that was xfat and I tried everything and ended up going into Terminal to mount the drive, and after trying several different ways in terminal it finally worked.

[@davidtverberg2606]

Dang!! I did exactly what you did. I should have watched this 3 years ago. Great video, thank you much.

Thank you for this story. I have a similar experience with external SSD. I formated it to exFat use it on Mac and when I plug it to PC error popup shows that the disk needs to be checked. I did the test (it takes a few seconds) and when it finished one of my folder (35GB of video footage) was gone. I tried to save the data but without luck. One guy from the data recovery company tells me that exFat isn't very reliable file system. It brings both worlds (Mac and PC) together but neither works 100%.

[@pojcharapoltosukowong]

I am using an external hard drive enclosure with RAID1 as well on a Mac, and I did formatted them to use exFAT. Granted, I did acknowledge the limitations for exFAT due to its lack of file system journaling. Although, at least for my use case I just use it as a "bulk transfer" drive between me and my other classmates who uses Windows, and its been working fine for a past year. So, after watching this, I'd say that you CAN use exFAT for RAID1 but ONLY for a TRANSFER drive or NON-CRITICAL data. Cheers :)

I think I have the same problem, i just switched to mac and my MyBook duo works very well on my PC but it can't mount on my mac

[@somborn]

Hardware failing? Whoa Nelly, wait a minute!

[@knowitallproductions1178]

I’m watching this 4 years later, only stumbled across it b/c I’m researching the enclosure/about to pull the trigger on a refurb for $170 USD (2TB, but I’d be using 2x SSD) Getting my popcorn ready for when part 2 comes out and it’s “HFS+ VS APFS, lololol.

[@marcobtv8227]

Did you check Finde> Preferences if the option Share>Connected Servers and Devices>External Disks were both ticked on? If these were not ticked on, it could prevent you from seen the drive on the desktop. Another thing you could have done, was to renew your DHCP under System Preferences>Network>Advanced>TCP/IP and clicked the button Renew DHCP Lease.

[@s.londonschertzer5005]

I learned so much from this video. You are excellent at explaining your process and how you went about it.

[@emmanuelbalan8160]

SMR hard drives are a big problem for backups (even in HFS+J). If you've never heard of the SMR hard drive scandal, do a Google search. It seems that comments on this issue are systematically deleted by the author of the video. Why?

[@craigjovanovich6450]

I think you exFAT issue was spot on. I had a USB stick do the exact same thing. It just disappeared as being a drive. exFAT formatted. I think that's the reason.

[@docstrange27]

I'm glade you were able to figure out what was the problem.. Looks like these MBD are available anymore.. I see a new version the two tone colors now.. WD don't even have the one you are talking about on their site anymore.. I guess they know these was an issue... thxs for the story....

[@bertieshanks7427]

extfat was originally designed by microsoft for use with removable digital camera SD media, which is where it performs best, but using it with raid disk arrays and managed by WD raid controllers and related firmware shows that, in this instance extfat should not have been certified as ready for enterprise use scenarios.

[@Budfrog23]

Really interesting video - I have a WD MyCloud EX2 fitted with 2 x 8tb Seagate Ironwolf Pro HDDs in a Windows 11 environment. HD1 started suffering a solid red light which went away after a re-boot but came back again a day or so later. Thinking it was a HDD issue I RMA'd the drive to Seagate and a week after installing the replacement (and rebuilding RAID 1 YAWN) same thing. Now I'm sure it's not the HDD and I think it's a false flag which would be a firmware problem. I've made a couple of local adjustments by powering the external fan I have for extra cooling separately rather than using the USB socket of the unit - without it the HDDs get quite warm even when not transferring data. The other thing I've done is disable drive sleep to see if that helps - it may also help my TV to keep the NAS connected as it occasionally loses the unit's media server. Will wait and see but everything is backed up elsewhere and so I may just continue running the NAS even if the red light comes back. I went with WD as i thought it was a solid brand - maybe Synology would have been a better option.

[@kodiakandgrizzlybears3787]

This footage is very informative regarding hardware encryption!!

[@TheComputinggeek]

Thanks so much for sharing your story, I myself bought these and I will defenintely go for JBOD and no exFat. Thanks for helping me avoid problems down the line, thought it was cheap for WD Red drives without a catch.

[@jacksilver-blue7040]

JBOD pleas don’t do this. JBOD is worse then RAID 0 ! JBOD gives you no security whatsoever. He was talking about HFS+J VS ExFAT not JBOD! If you want to know about how to set up a real backup solution see my other comment to the author of the video.

[@OSMPhotography]

Excellent video! Saved for future reference! When you were trying to recover the data, did you try to access the raid on a Windows PC?

[@rodaniell]

...but did you try hooking up the drive enclosure to a PC via the Ethernet port? just to see if you could recover (copy/transfer) your files? instead of Mac?

[@EricS-uf9mv]

Great info. Thanks for the tip. I'm gonna use 2 of these on a Windows machine so I'll probably reformat to NTFS instead of using the DEFAULT exFAT format these ship with. I dunno if exFAT is as unreliable on Win as MacOS, but no reason to take a chance. Thx again.

[@intheskyaerials]

What happened? Any problems? Did you finally use NTFS? I'd appreciate a lot your experience!

[@EricS-uf9mv]

@@intheskyaerials Sorry, but I ended up buying a different version of the WD drive and "shucked" the drives so my experience prob won't help U, since I'm using my WD drives in an unintended manner. But yes, I did format my drives as NTFS and haven't had any issues. But again, I am NOT using them inside their USB enclosures as they're intended to be used. I shucked my drives & added them to my server. I've bought 7x 6-10TB WD Elements versions instead of the My Book Duo featured in this video. I went with the Elements version b/c they are better for shucking as they don't include any drive encryption hardware or software on the USB host adapter that might complicate the shucking process.

[@intheskyaerials]

@@EricS-uf9mv I see.. well thanks anyway and I'm glad that you found a solution that worked for you!

[@UweSchweerLambers]

I had the same issue on my pc. Suddenly the MyBook was gone ( NTFS Format). I plugged out the disk to see if there is still something on it. No luck. After plugin´m in agian, i changed cables, power adapter and usb port. And then it runs again. No problems.

[@ThatMarkGilroy]

This just happened to me. Was moving all my files onto a NAS and the WD just died. Got a RAID failure message which now doesn’t show up at all. No utility will recover it.

[@Ureallydontknow]

long story short he had RAID 1 + exFAT but managed to corrupt them both simultaneously from incorrect power down procedure or the mac not having %100 robust drivers for exFAT. I corrupt my exFAT all the time but I am always able to recover by rebooting and powering down correctly. You just can't use an operating system that is not compatible with the drive controller (the external enclosure) you used for the exFAT drive.

[@TamTamster]

Interesting video. I’ve had a Mac for ten years with one of these storing my photos and music. Now I have a windows machine and wanted to use with that but I had the drive formatted as Mac OS extended and the pc can’t read it…plus it’s an old thunderbolt2 version which (of course) windows doesn’t have anyway. Okay so anyway, I’m in the process of copying the files off it to then reformat and had assumed I would have to use exfat as “the other option” but a) not gonna do that now and b) for windows I’d want ntfs. Was thinking of just getting a newer one anyway to get away from the old thunderbolt stuff - if I do then I’ll avoid exfat. And maybe also use some cloud backup as well!

[@digibactechnologies]

Ex-FAT is only used for transferring files ( one & done ) from a Windows file system to a Mac IOS

[@ProGamer-vv7ef]

It's great you figured out the problem but you wouldn't have lost the data had you just tried to plug the drive into a windows pc and then format it once you retrieved the data.

[@intheskyaerials]

You think he would have recovered for sure?

[@akapal]

i have a problem with western, lost everything cause of a bad enclosure, the problem is they encrypt the data and its board specific so you cant swap the board or take the disk out, be sure your data is not encrypted in hardware level before you lose everything

[@schmuck924]

hey stronz, sorry to hear about your troubles. Next time if you do run into failures you can run a live cd ( that means not installing it, but just to use the os ) of ubuntu, fedora, or some other linux distro, and use root and file manager nautilus. chances are Linux will see it. this has happened to me in the past.

[@_tographer]

Thanks for the tip! These files were not that important so giving up was ultimately the easiest solution but if it had been professional work I would have definitely tried every obscure method for recovery possible.

[@IrishObyrne]

I performed a soft reboot on mine and my shares no longer appear on the web console. oddly, the share i created on the attached usb drive does still appear. im gonna look for fix, or attempt disk recovery.

[@rodypiyasin837]

The problem is you format drive to be exFAT by using Mac OS. If you format the drive to be exFAT with Windows OS it would be fine. It is kinda funky when using Mac to do non Mac stuffs.

[@JamesBondage]

i learned that mistake for one of my drives years ago so i always format my drives in hfs journaled and apfs now. also have one external as exfat when i need to use it for windows which i hardly ever do.

[@avaidamico]

I wish I had seen this video last year. Came here because two of my My Book Duos mysteriously became permanently invisible a couple months after formatting as ExFat... :'(

[@rotojo2]

Maybe just make it to have an drive letter to show up, in Windows. ?

[@craigmyers9807]

I had the same issue, and same result research I was only able to get some data back using test disk/photorec my system was Windows. I will avoid exfat

[@gengpan]

the annoying part of WD my book product is, the drives are encrypt. if the case is broken, you can not use drives in other PC. similarly to upgrading old drive with new one. old drive is encrypted.

[@simons8175]

Anyone know how to recover files from a Seagate 1tb back up drive? It was originally formatted with 2011 MacBook Air using ext journal ( might be encrypted), & there was a Time Machine back up on it. I bought a 2014/15 MacBook Pro but never used the backup. Then I upgraded to a 2021 MacBook Pro m1, & plugged in the drive, & it’s not reading the hard drive in disk utility. I plugged it in the 2015 Mac it shows I’m using 980gb but I can’t read anything…. Any reasons why or how this can be solved?

[@hokkypro]

You need to do the 3v mod if you take them out of the enclousure. Then they will appear as normal.

[@intheskyaerials]

What do you mean? How would you do that, and before or after taking them out?

[@BrainHurricanes]

I'm curious to know if you now put one working drive (with hfs+) out of you WD book into a dock, if you can read the data ? I think it would be completely useless to have 2 drives, when the case brakes, you can no longer acces any of the drives! I would't be to happy if I had to buy a complete new WD book (for as long as they are available!) to acces the data on a broken device. If so, do you know of any other options ? I'm thinking to attach 2 drives (sata to usb3 enclosure) to an "old" imac and let MacOs do the raid1, but even then I'm not sure what happens if one drive fails. Edit: Thanks for the warning!

[@fuzzybunnyslipperz]

You can buy something like this for local backups, but ALWAYS have an off-site backup. This in combo with IDRIVE, MOZY or Spider Oak can be a powerful and cost effective personal solution. For your office, it's dangerous to leave company data backups accessible locally. Backups to an enterprise solution can protect against ransomware and provide you a cloud out solution to ensure the data is off-site. A company that cannot recover their data in a disaster will suffer tremendously or go out of business outright. Tivoli Storage Manager, Commvault, Netbackup all have solutions. HP and IBM have server / storage that when bought together can provide a powerful solution locally and the backup software usually has a cloud out option where the data can be copied to the cloud in a secure way. Or get a data domain behind the IBM / HP servers. Perhaps worth a look.

[@andrea_ricciardi]

First of all i want to apologize for my bad english but i can say something. (i'm in love with subtitles) 1) Without paragon software (i think other software are good too) i had a lot of problems with two disks obviously since i've used a tird part software to handle NTFS, issues are not anymore 2) i think every system works better e safer with its native "functions" i would refer to choose which computer is MAIN and work only in that one when i need to work on another one i make a simple file tranfer between them (FTP al least) but without sharing nothing This is not applyed if disks contain files that are not really important to me I think is important that people share their experiences and i don't mind hoe long is the way they use Thank you

[@DigiDriftZone]

I have an external drive with HFS+ (journalled), *twice* now the 8TB drive has become corrupt and read only. Sure, it's nice that I can still access the files, but copying across 6TB of stuff to another drive to reformat is a pain. HFS+ (journalled) is extremely brittle if you unplug it by accident several times (e.g. in my case it's plugged into my laptop and I knocked the cable out by accident a few times) - I was actually going to format as exFAT next time as it seems less brittle to unexpected unplugging.

[@uzefulvideos3440]

Running `chkdsk X: /f` or `chkdsk X: /r` (with "X" being the volume letter of the affected drive) on Windows would have most likely repaired the corrupted file system. It's a shame exFAT doesn't support journaling.

[@PacalB]

Very informative, thank you very much for the heads up on this. 👍

[@hugeslacker]

I use backblaze to backup to the cloud and use these for local storage

[@globalste]

Was about to buy one of these, so lucky to have seen this video. How does this video possibly have negative/thumbs down?!?

[@IDIturboDiesel]

There's drivers available for Windows 11 to be able to read and write Mac formatted drives.

[@NR-rv8rz]

Just took delivery of one. So exfat is ok if I use Windows 10. In fact is it the only option.

[@katumus]

So shortly put: WD disk drives enforces encryption even if you do not enable it, and so on if your hardware driving the RAID dies, so does the encryption key and data can't be recovered. This is the exactly same thing that has been since 90's, DO NOT USE MOTHERBOARDS RAID FUNCTIONALITY! In fact, DO NOT USE HARDWARE RAID FUNCTIONS (unless very specifically confirmed to be very strictly recoverable without hardware). Want the easy solution? Buy harddrives as such, get a USB dock and store data first to one drive. Then run a syncronization for another drive. Linux software RAID's is OS level, works perfectly and doesn't cause trouble. Microsoft might offer good option, don't know about OS X itself. But just forget all the enclosures etc that has hardware RAID.

[@jonathantitus5437]

I found one of these at work. I run a small business and someone turned this in after they seen the WD My Book Duo fall out of someones car. I don't have any security footage to return to owner. What can I do with this? lol

[@dafyddthomas7299]

Don't 100% trust hard drive, even a raid 0/1's hard drive, always have a 2nd physical backup hard drive device and make sure backups are frequently done from Raid 1 hard drive to 2nd back up Hard drive.

[@RobNicholson1234]

Indeed. Whilst RAID mirroring does give some level of data protection (i.e. one drive can fail), it's more about maintaining up-time and improving performance. It does not negate the need for a separate backup. If the enclosure electronics fail, then you're on dodgy ground as to whether those disks can be imported into another system. RAID controllers tend to bespoke solutions. It's one (small) advantage of Windows software RAID - you can stick the disks in almost any other Windows system and import the array

[@kellyjameson1920]

The latest My Book Duo addresses this issue and you can now access the drives inside the enclosure.

[@intheskyaerials]

Really? I just got one, I'd like to know more of your experience!

[@woooweee]

Exfat is only for usb thumb drives/flash cards. Its not made to be reliable at all, just simple as possible for portable/low write endurance media.

[@polynomial]

I don't want to lose data as a learning experience.

[@GardelesUruguayo]

The reason why you couldn't read the files in the hard drives is because WD Mybook Live duo hard drives are formatted in Linux.

[@JayJay-pg1zx]

I was curious, do you think you could have got your footage back if you hooked it up to a windows computer sense it was cross capable ?

[@nameredacted1242]

And what happens when one disk fails? Does the utility tell you which disk failed? How does it go about rebuilding the array after you give it a new empty drive instead of one that failed???

[@igorsirca6814]

Question: is there possible to install non WD disks into My book duo, Thanks....

[@andremax77]

Thanks because I was about to use ex-fat until I listened to your story.

[@fthprodphoto-video5357]

Did you try to use a recovery software after reformatting your drive from EXFAT to HFS+J ?

[@ivanbal]

How about the My Book Duo Cloud, would you recommend that?

[@MarkGardnerRuneImp]

Never use exFAT for storing important data. It IS NOT a hi-performance file system. It is an extension to FAT32 which is also not a hi-performance file system. The purpose of exFAT's existence is for things like USB thumb drives to be able to handle extremely long filenames, very large files (measured in PetaBytes instead of FAT32's 4 GB limit) and be cross-compatible. Almost any operating system you may come across can read and write exFAT or have exFAT support added. All recent (last decade or more) Linux, macOS, and Windows systems can read and write exFAT. The only reason it is an option on these drive systems is for cross-compatibility. But then your losing journaling and other safety features that are part of HPFS, HPFS+J, NTFS (Windows, but most Linux systems and read and write to NTFS drives). If NTFS was supported natively on macOS (there are options but none are native) then NFTS would be a great option for this drive system where compatibility between Mac and Windows (and Linux) is necessary. I also highly doubt much work and testing was put into the exFAT support on this drive system. At the time of it's introduction (and even now in many places) if you own a drive like this you were very unlikely to also have a Windows machine that you needed to support with the same drive setup. The feature is of dubious need in any case. If you need to share files with a Windows machine attach an FAT formatted (FAT32 or exFAT) USB-3 drive to a USB-3 port and copy those files to the USB drive. Then give the USB drive to the Windows machine. If you need a RAID-1 setup for a Windows system get one designed for Windows so you can format it with NTFS. For hi-performance and safety always use NTFS on Windows systems when available. With the exception of thumb or other memory based drives (SDcard, etc.). For those use exFAT for sharing. Or NTFS if you don't like the idea of sharing with other operating systems other than Linux.

[@JackaTrial]

didn't saw the end of this video... dude, get to the fucking point!!

[@davidg4512]

J B ikr. 15 minutes, had to skip around

[@ManBikeSwag]

did you try plugin it into a windows PC? Maybe it would have let you recover EXFAT?

[@harryp8456]

Thanks for great explaining you should have a reward form WD

[@griffetheo]

Salut, je suis après car je suis en grosse galère ! Je suis photographe et j'ai mon my book duo qui à disparu d'un coup de mon folder ! (sur mac donc) Je pensais qu'en ayant choisi le mode RAID 1, cela m'aurait permis de pouvoir connecter au moins un des deux DD directement sans le raid en SATA pour pouvoir récupérer mes fichier facilement! Mais non aucun des deux DD n'apparaît sur Mac ou Windows... Est ce que quelqu'un sait si c'est normal? Que un DD crame ok mais les deux en même temps ?! Possible? Enfin je ne vois pas trop l'utilité de faire un RAID si pour ne pas pouvoir récupérer ses fichiers ensuite... Le pire c'est que l'application WD Drive utilities me dit que tout vas bien ! J'ai donc fait un scan avec Wondershare recoverit sur mon mac où j'arrive à voir mes photos et dossiers mais une fois que je les récupères elles sont illisibles ... Je vais maintenant passer par un pc et faire la meme manip pour voir si les photos seront lisibles après la récup... Je l'espère... Si quelqu'un à l'explication à mon problème et une solution je suis preneur ! :) Merci !

[@yonoko6901]

how did you was able to reformat the drives if your pc couldn't see them? thx

[@dieterdongphrajan4107]

I have the same question too, how can you reformat a disk that does not show on your mac

[@mje772003]

Mine is on ex fat and but had a power outage and the WD tools found that disk 2 failed so have just had to purchase a new red 6 TB drive also run a mac

[@CJ-sf2lu]

Will Disk Drill restore a RAID disk?

[@natihdmovies8226]

i need help i have 20 tb hard dirive and both unallocated i need help pls

[@EPHONIC]

I'm about to buy one. Does it come preformatted for Mac in the HFS-J format or EXFAT?

[@jasonnewland2029]

Did you try connecting the drive to a windows PC? I've had similar issues and used Ubuntu and the drives mount just fine. Note (I don't think Ubuntu supports exfat) I gave up too soon after multiple attempts with my MacBook. WD hfs+ NTFS and EXfat drives have done this to me. Also after more research I've found that if you wait 30 minutes are more with it connected to our macs. The EXfat drive eventually mounts as a read only drive. This happens after it fails multiple times to mount as a read and write drive in the background. I think mine HFS+ was due to unplugging before ejecting the drives. Not by me but sometimes I would notice when coming back to my MacBook I'd see the improper ejection warning message. Note I don't recommend using non powered USB hubs. As for the NTFS drive failing. I'm in the same boat for a reason why. Maybe software?? Let me explain. I know Ubuntu worked like a charm. So, I just recently tried uninstalling all WD software. I still couldn't get the NTFS drive to mount, except with Ubuntu. I did a fresh Mac OS install then I connected the drive and the NTFS drive mounted immediately on my mack OS sierra. Since My recent experience, I will not be using WD software again.

[@ishudshutup]

Thanks so much for sharing, very helpful info!

[@pgtips4240]

Really interesting and enjoyable video. I have already been down this road with WD drives, most of the things you described have been my experience too. I'm not going to chance another WD system until they make it possible to recover data or start making better encryption cases that are more robust.