16 ms·

Western Digital cloud services down for 4 days

368 points by cloudking 4y ago

quaintdev 4y ago
Another reason to self host https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-start-self-hosting/ https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-start-self-hosting/
- mrtksn 4y ago
  The problem with self hosting is that it quickly becomes very insecure and unreliable because it needs to be managed and most people don't like managing it. Even if you are fine with managing it, strange errors will occur and you will solve those errors by following tutorials and you(maybe not you specifically, but most people) wouldn't know what you are doing and you will introduce security holes. Self hosting will be possible only when there is a software which doesn't have settings and runs on a box which also doesn't have settings beyond wi-fi settings. Plug it into the wall and forget about it. Which is actually what WD is trying to do but apparently your setup can go down for days because it has an intermediary component which needs to be managed, can get compromised and can go down.
  - dannyw 4y ago
    > Self hosting will be possible only when there is a software which doesn't have setting and runs on a box which also doesn't have settings beyond wi-fi settings. Plug it into the wall and forget about it. Buy a Synology DiskStation, and you get an easy-to-use yet customisable OS, that receives security updates for up to a decade. Also comes with checksums/data scrubbing (btrfs; like zfs), Docker support, snapshots, E2E diff-based backups to your choice of cloud provider, an optional cloud-based NAT-puncher if you don't like/know to set up port forwarding, etc. Sure, the hardware has a markup, but you're paying for a nearly-Apple-like experience that's still crazily customisable. I've had zero complaints.
    - fulafel 4y ago
      I've had tech savvy friends have good brand (don't remember if qnap or synology) NAS devices compromised. OS patches help but for example the 3rd party stuff you install might be a risk, or things that are patched too slowly in the os, etc. In the end you still need to manage and monitor it. It seems a lot of guidance about securing your NAS (eg [1]) starts with "it's bad if it's directly connected to the internet". So if you want to use the internet, it may be a better bet to use a managed service (or maybe look for a more security focused product?). [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/recent-qnap-and-synology-security-alerts-how-to-protect-your-nas/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/recent-qnap-and-synology-secu...
      - jhugo 4y ago
        I usually turn off all "cloud" / Internet-accessible features of everything (and, where possible, even block things from Internet access), and then have a Wireguard VPN back to my home network. I think this is a better balance of security and usability than trusting that all of the NAS/camera/doorknob/printer/etc vendors are any good at securing these things.
        fulafel 4y ago
        The use of VPNs to mitigate iffy security in self-hosted stuff is common but comes with its own problems, simultaneously it makes your self-hosted services harder to access (or impossible from some contextx), and it hurts security by making your system more complex (harder to understand & manage & monitor). They're also seemingly going out of fashion as zero-trust/beyondcorp/identity-aware proxies gain mindshare. Of course if you (along with friends and family) are all-in on a overlay network like tailscale it can be a different story.
        jhugo 4y ago
        Actually, I find that a simple wireguard tunnel giving boring old IP routing to my home network is a far simpler setup than every device having its own opaque tunnel back to its vendor which I have to use a vendor-specific method of connecting to. Tailscale is also more complex, though a nice product. So far I haven't encountered any context where I couldn't connect to my wireguard tunnel, but YMMV.
  - archerx 4y ago
    I’ve been self hosting a nextcloud instance for many years and its been great without any issue. I love it and I use it everyday.
    - benatkin 4y ago
      I gave NextCloud a shot and didn't like it. For one thing whatever I had set up for it was sending too many notifications on Android. So YMMV.
      - archerx 4y ago
        The app sucks, I have been using the web interface exclusively even on mobile.
  - throwaway2056 4y ago
    This. Plus: people here calling for Raspberry or Synology do not know 'average' users - People dont know what is ethernet - Most people cant navigate GUI of synology or other stuff - Some of the hn gurus need to work as CS for a week. People get confused what USB-A or USB-C cable. - For hn-gurus with Rpi/nextcloud: These products are sold to average joe that has no clue about tech. - for average joe people, google is internet, facebook is family and whatsapp is chat. - The sales guy that sold it just works for commission. Capitalism. - Same is for WD. They sold the product for $100 8TB so that is the quality one expects.
    - quaintdev 4y ago
      Then we need to work on it to make self hosting as ubiquitous as a TV. Imagine a future where all your photos, videos stay at your house on a box and others who have access can view them from anywhere. The corporations are working in direction where this is never possible but given how they all deal with data this is the only future that will be secure and makes sense.
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        >Imagine a future where all your photos, videos stay at your house on a box and others who have access can view them from anywhere. We are slowly working towards such a future and common users by and large will appreciate it, but it's not going to be the future most tech nerds envision it to be.
        copper-float 4y ago
        What are you referring to?
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        Basically: Convenience and customizability are mutually exclusive. We as tech nerds value our ability to power user, but this is quite simply at odds with the interests of common users. Things like further and further abstractioning of file systems, further and further integrations of operating systems with online accounts and other internet services, further and further "appliance"ing of computer systems, etc.
  - CapsAdmin 4y ago
    Although the consequences of failure are not as severe, you could make a similar argument against cooking your own food as the outcome can be unreliable and time consuming. Some enjoy doing it, some just purchase microwave food and some just pay or get someone else to do it for them. Then there are chefs in the media that try to make cooking more accessible with the message that it's not as difficult as people make it out to be. However some pushback/warning against self hosting because we don't yet have a good alternative to reliable "microwave food" is good I guess.
    - bon00r 4y ago
      [flagged]
  - mihaaly 4y ago
    "it quickly becomes very insecure and unreliable" As anything else! As the above picture shows. With the added bonus that you are cluless of the state of a Cloud (no insights of its real state, its actual practices, also kept in darkness, only over confident corporate statements). (actually there are quite fine self hosted products with maintainance updates and help where you do not have to be an IT practitioner to use, equal to the level required from Cloud services, just look around)
  - qwertox 4y ago
    While I self-host everything, I fully agree with this. If it works and has no internet access, you'll just leave it there, running for a year, two years, when suddenly something changes. Either you need to upgrade the underlying OS to a new major version or some 3rd-party client changes, and you're confronted with a wall of stuff you must do. Or even if it's something as simple as MongoDB, after a patch (not even a minor version bump), no longer being supported on the Raspberry Pi 4 even though MongoDB themselves posted a blog post a couple of months before that change showing how to easily install it on this device.
  - Bender 4y ago
    I've been self hosting openssh sftp for decades and not run into any problems with security as of yet but it could be I am just lucky. I do not expose any services to IP's that I do not control with exception to my public SFTP servers but there is nothing sensitive or important on those. The boxes auto-update OS patches but I manually reboot them just to ensure they come back in a happy state. This is just to say that a chroot SFTP server and the lftp client is all one really needs to push backups to wherever with functionality similar to rsync but with slower directory enumeration because there isn't a corresponding sync client on the remote end. That's fine with me since I can be asleep when this occurs. For cell phone backups one of the many SFTP clients is AdminHands but I find anything for cell phones is mediocre at best.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    Hello, can you please expand on how using syncthing out of the box would be deemed insecure? Genuinely concerned ive missed something
- rwalle 4y ago
  Try sending this URL to your uncle. Hacker news is not the entire world.
0xy 4y ago
Who buys this garbage? I swore off WD and refunded several drives after their SMR scam. I wouldn't touch any of their online services.
- kragen 4y ago
  there isn't a wide selection of hard disk manufacturers left, and none untainted with the smr scam afaik that is of course no reason to touch their online services
  - Latty 4y ago
    WD was kinda the worst for putting it into their NAS product line though, I don't think any of the others were that bad. You are right though, hard drives are kinda all much the same.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      I went Seagate for my NAS's HDDs because they are explicit whether a given drive is SMR or CMR. I say this as someone who up until then always bought WD HDDs.
      - MaKey 4y ago
        I'm giving Toshiba a try now with two MG09 18TB HDDs. 5 year warranty and peak transfer rates of nearly 300 MB/s. I've had bad luck with two Seagate 4TB ST4000DM000 HDDs, they both failed after warranty was over. I think it was a bad model. My other Seagate disks (2x 8TB CMR and 2x 8TB SMR) have been working just fine for a few years.
- astral303 4y ago
  the consumer has no choice. if you buy an HDD, you gambling.
- janpieterz 4y ago
  Had to look up[1] what the SMR scam was about, short summary: different disks with lower random I/O performance were sold without being marked as such. 1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
jsnk 4y ago
"Western Digital is cutting 251 workers in California" https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/11/22/western-digital-latest-valley-company-with-layoffs.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/11/22/western-... A possible contributing cause
MrFoof 4y ago
The reality is WD My Cloud was breached yet again: https://www.pcworld.com/article/1681254/western-digitals-my-cloud-goes-down-after-hack.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/1681254/western-digitals-my-...
- Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
  Was gonna say that my defualt mindset is now "If something is down for longer than a day, they have been breached!".
- COGlory 4y ago
  >“Western Digital is currently experiencing a service outage impacting the following products: My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS5, SanDisk ibi, SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger" In what world does a wireless charger need a cloud?
  - afavour 4y ago
    “Ixpand” is the clue: it comes bundled with a photo backup service. Presumably the charger itself is working just fine.
  - dpedu 4y ago
    Perhaps it does something like the iPhone's "Clean Energy Charging" feature? This requires some sort of internet connection to know when to charge. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213323 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213323
    - patrickthebold 4y ago
      Presumably the phone knows the time and the charger does not need to connect to the internet.
- jmathai 4y ago
  I worked at WD for about 2 years (via acquisition). I never really used their cloud services for any personal reason - because I either couldn’t get them to work or didn’t trust them. I wouldn’t use their MyCloud NAS devices as a reliable place to store any important data. Their cloud services routinely go down like this. And they just don’t communicate with their users.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
saidinesh5 4y ago
The crazy thing is their MyCloud line up used to support local only operation until an OS upgrade disabled it apparently. Just their MyCloud hard drive + syncthing has been my ideal backup solution for all my devices for about 5 years now. Any document I save on any of my device instantly gets replicated onto all my devices. Any picture/video i take on my phone gets backed up to my NAS automatically. I used to host a browser based file manager and had dynamic dns pointing to that NAS for the rare use case where i wanted to share a file with someone via a link. Such a shame I'll have to re do all this set up if/when i need to move away from that drive...
- sureglymop 4y ago
  Why not just use syncthing? I do that. You can even set up an encrypted node on e.g. an aws vps. That node won't see any of your files but still any them.
  - saidinesh5 4y ago
    I'm currently using syncthing itself on MyCloud. I had to run a little script to enable third party applications on MyCloud and installed syncthing from that. Thanks for the tip about the encrypted node though
- NKosmatos 4y ago
  Hey I have a WD MyCloud with OS5 (updated to latest release) and it works localy. I've disabled all the silly cloud and online services and I use it perfectly fine as a local NAS. It's people who were using the cloud features that are affected by this hack. To be clear and honest, other vendors have faced similar issues. I remember D-Link many years ago and Synology more recently. We have to accept that all cloud services are susceptible to attacks, downtime and so it's always good to have local (and offsite) backups of your important files.
  - agloe_dreams 4y ago
    If you have automatic updates turned on, I would still assume you were breached. It can remotely re-enable cloud services and there's all kinds of unknown implementation details.
NKosmatos 4y ago
Another typical corporate status page that has no real information and it’s of no value. Why do companies still have these silly pages that don’t actually provide any helpful information to their users/customers? They also don’t offer info or real support over at their forum as well, same corporate silence https://community.wd.com/ https://community.wd.com/
- owyn 4y ago
  Because it's a checklist/todo item for most companies. "Oh, Fred, that status page thing, is it done?" "Yep, I got this perl script, it even updates the timestamp automatically! update_status.pl <intensity> <reason>". "Good enough, ship it." (sometime in the future - the site goes down) Oh, where's that perl script? Fred went on vacation...
  - expertentipp 4y ago
    Fred was impatiently mumbling about one service, need to refactor it or something. What a maniac. We are busy with kubernaytez and ay-eye. Would a chat work instead of status page perhaps?
    - lionkor 4y ago
      > Would a chat work instead of status page perhaps? That is truly an expertentipp.
    - skeeter2020 4y ago
      Fred has been laid off. Monica and Charles over in Marketing handle status updates now with generic tweets about how we care deeply about our customers and lots of cool emojis
    - alexjplant 4y ago
      Am I the only person on the Earth that enjoys using Kubernetes? Running it yourself or having to deal with buying it from IBM is no fun at all but manaed k8s (GKE, DO, etc) works great and beats the ever-living hell out of managing server state. JMO.
jonplackett 4y ago
Western digital is the brand of drive I wanted one up from back when I was building a 386sx. Funny that anyone wants to buy cloud services from them 30 years later.
- xtracto 4y ago
  Aaah I remember those darn WD DeathStar disks haha. Who in their right mind still trust this company?
bastard_op 4y ago
So much for trusting the cloud, WD is just another dysfunctional company that can't manage security.
greatgib 4y ago
People should really be clueless or out of their mind to trust this kind of company with their data on the cloud. Company like that have no idea how to do serious storage, for them it is just a checkbox on a "recurring revenue increase" OKR objective.
- voytec 4y ago
  It's more problematic in some areas, like wireless access points. Any reliable maker these days? Cisco Meraki sends data to their "cloud" (or even has to be managed through cloud services) and so does Ubiquiti hardware.
nickdothutton 4y ago
Surely this will be the end for their cloud storage business. Who would use if after being down for 1 week and zero information provided through their official channels.
hoofhearted 4y ago
Way back in 2012 when I started my last startup, I had setup some quick and easy redundant WD NAS drives lol. I couldn’t ever keep them in sync, the remote piece never worked, and one of the drives died within the first few months lol.. They ended up in the garbage, with a bunch of drill holes through the drives. I quickly throw together a Freenas server with 4 redundant disks, and we never lost data for over a decade after that switch. Freenas scaled with us as we grew, and 4 drives grew into over 32 drives spread over a couple Dell poweredge clusters. When COVID hit and everyone went into lockdown, Freenas saved the day for us once again. I had already setup our storage servers behind a VPN, and when everyone quit coming into the office, they already had all their files synced up to their laptop from Freenas :)
- wil421 4y ago
  I use FreeNAS with WD Red (non-same) drives and everything works fine. Guessing you used some WD software.
  - hoofhearted 4y ago
    Yea, WD makes really good enterprise and NAS grade drives lol.. However back in 2012, we had a laptop that died with about 3 months worth of work gone. I ran out to Microcenter and bought 2 of the WD MyCloud NAS devices. It was like a mini Linux machine with a single NAS drive and an Ethernet port. They worked great for about a month; but they lacked the ability to do auto backups of themselves to another spare MyCloud device. We initially had a quick SOP on how to copy/paste the primary drive to the secondary drive, but the drives became out of sync within a month. Our primary MyCloud device locked up within a month and bricked the drive. We were SOL once again, and only had a semi copy on the backup drive. I bought a pc case, a supermicro board with ECC memory on eBay, and 4 WD Red NAS drives. Problem was solved, and I destroyed the MyCloud devices lol.. WD wasn’t really concerned either when I contacted them. I must say, Tom Lawerence of Lawerence Systems on YouTube was one of the biggest aids for us when we were setting up and scaling our large it systems. https://youtu.be/vxFNBZIAClc https://youtu.be/vxFNBZIAClc
    - 4y ago
guiambros 4y ago
Posted earlier this week [1], but didn't get much traction. TL;DR: yes, they were breached. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35449006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35449006
dolmen 4y ago
Terms of use: YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT USE OF THE SERVICES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK AND THAT THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO SATISFACTORY QUALITY, PERFORMANCE, ACCURACY, AND EFFORT IS WITH YOU. ALL PARTS OFTHE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED BY WESTERN DIGITALON AN “AS IS,” “WITHALL FAULTS,” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS ONLY, WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. WESTERNDIGITAL HEREBY EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL REPRESENTATIONS,WARRANTIES, AND CONDITIONS WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICES (INCLUDING THE USE, PERFORMANCE, AND SUPPORT THEREOF), WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE,INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, MERCHANTABILITY, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.WESTERN DIGITAL DOES NOT MAKE ANY ASSURANCES WITH REGARD TO THE ACCURACY OF THE RESULTS OR OUTPUT THAT DERIVES FROM THE SERVICES. Source: https://www.westerndigital.com/legal/terms-of-use https://www.westerndigital.com/legal/terms-of-use
- KMnO4 4y ago
  Random question; why are terms written in all caps?
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    To make them harder to read. Edit: In this case it appears they’re using it for emphasis, since the majority of the ToS is in normal caps, but it was definitely a deliberate dark pattern until very recently to make the ToS hard to read.
    - Closi 4y ago
      This isn’t true - caps are a legal standard in the USA to indicate that this section is higher-importance for the reader. It’s actually a legal obligation to make your terms “conspicuous”. So it’s actually supposed to be the opposite - to meet a legal obligation to highlight to users that they should pay particular notice to certain sections.
      - rationalist 4y ago
        PARAGRAPHS OF ALL CAPS is harder to read for some people.
eob 4y ago
I lost a decade of family photos using a Western Digital RAID-in-a-box setup (WD MyCloud or something) Both hard disks fried at the same time.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > Both hard disks fried at the same time. I'm sorry for your family pictures: it's the one personal thing I've got copies of everywhere (online / offline / on-site / off-site). But... Regarding HDDs/SSDs failing at the same time: the common mantra is to be very careful of disks from the same batch. There have been SSDs too failing after a certain amount of hours of usage. I like to use different brands or, at the very least, different models from the same brand. Now I'm not saying it's what happened in our case: if they literally fried, then it's another problem.
- rvba 4y ago
  Question from a laic. When someone setups a RAID they usually buy disks from the same manufacturer. And those might stop working at the same time (e.g. warranty for 24 months, so they 'strangely' fry in 25th). Is it possible to mix disks from different manufacturers in a RAID?
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    Linux/FreeBSD software RAID (using OS tools or things like FreeNAS) doesn't care what the devices are, just that the space makes sense (e.g. for RAID1 you need 2 volumes of the same size). I'm not sure to the extent hardware RAID cares these days. NAS boxes from hard drive manufacturers might care about the drive vendor, but I've never used them.
  - jf93ap29sh 4y ago
    Technically you can mix & match as long as they are of the same capacity. Some NAS appliances might not like that tho. But a way around what you mention, keeping it to a single manufacturer: is to buy the drives from different retailers, hopefully geographically dispersed, a few weeks apart, to ensure you get drives from different manufacturing batches. Unless there's a systemic issue with the entire product line (unlikely to go unnoticed) you spread out the risk of a single bad batch that way. Maybe overkill, but that's what I did many years ago.
turnsout 4y ago
If you're on this orange website, give yourself the gift of building a TrueNAS (nee FreeNAS) setup. I cobbled one together in 2014 and it's still running nonstop. I've replaced two drives with absolutely zero drama, and it took about 20 minutes each time.
jimt1234 4y ago
Around 10 years ago, when cloud storage services got going, I copied all my stuff to Google Drive, thinking this was gonna solve all my problems. Well, 10 years later, in 2023, I've finally finished copying all my stuff back down to my laptop and storing anything important on 3 different 256-GB removable USB drives. I keep some stuff in Google Drive, mostly throw-away stuff, like goofy pictures I wanna share. But anything important is local now. I just got tired of weird policy changes, sometimes data would go missing, only to magically reappear a few days later, and I just lost trust in all cloud storage services. And this incident with WD is a great example of that.
ksec 4y ago
Now that Apple made Cloud Storage encryption a thing. They should remake the Time Machine and allow user to backup their iOS and Mac on Time Machine, while upselling you iCloud as Off Site Backup.
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]

368 points by cloudking 4y ago

Another reason to self host https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-start-self-hosting/ https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-start-self-hosting/

mrtksn 4y ago
The problem with self hosting is that it quickly becomes very insecure and unreliable because it needs to be managed and most people don't like managing it. Even if you are fine with managing it, strange errors will occur and you will solve those errors by following tutorials and you(maybe not you specifically, but most people) wouldn't know what you are doing and you will introduce security holes. Self hosting will be possible only when there is a software which doesn't have settings and runs on a box which also doesn't have settings beyond wi-fi settings. Plug it into the wall and forget about it. Which is actually what WD is trying to do but apparently your setup can go down for days because it has an intermediary component which needs to be managed, can get compromised and can go down.
- dannyw 4y ago
  > Self hosting will be possible only when there is a software which doesn't have setting and runs on a box which also doesn't have settings beyond wi-fi settings. Plug it into the wall and forget about it. Buy a Synology DiskStation, and you get an easy-to-use yet customisable OS, that receives security updates for up to a decade. Also comes with checksums/data scrubbing (btrfs; like zfs), Docker support, snapshots, E2E diff-based backups to your choice of cloud provider, an optional cloud-based NAT-puncher if you don't like/know to set up port forwarding, etc. Sure, the hardware has a markup, but you're paying for a nearly-Apple-like experience that's still crazily customisable. I've had zero complaints.
  - fulafel 4y ago
    I've had tech savvy friends have good brand (don't remember if qnap or synology) NAS devices compromised. OS patches help but for example the 3rd party stuff you install might be a risk, or things that are patched too slowly in the os, etc. In the end you still need to manage and monitor it. It seems a lot of guidance about securing your NAS (eg [1]) starts with "it's bad if it's directly connected to the internet". So if you want to use the internet, it may be a better bet to use a managed service (or maybe look for a more security focused product?). [1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/recent-qnap-and-synology-security-alerts-how-to-protect-your-nas/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/recent-qnap-and-synology-secu...
    - jhugo 4y ago
      I usually turn off all "cloud" / Internet-accessible features of everything (and, where possible, even block things from Internet access), and then have a Wireguard VPN back to my home network. I think this is a better balance of security and usability than trusting that all of the NAS/camera/doorknob/printer/etc vendors are any good at securing these things.
      - fulafel 4y ago
        The use of VPNs to mitigate iffy security in self-hosted stuff is common but comes with its own problems, simultaneously it makes your self-hosted services harder to access (or impossible from some contextx), and it hurts security by making your system more complex (harder to understand & manage & monitor). They're also seemingly going out of fashion as zero-trust/beyondcorp/identity-aware proxies gain mindshare. Of course if you (along with friends and family) are all-in on a overlay network like tailscale it can be a different story.
        jhugo 4y ago
        Actually, I find that a simple wireguard tunnel giving boring old IP routing to my home network is a far simpler setup than every device having its own opaque tunnel back to its vendor which I have to use a vendor-specific method of connecting to. Tailscale is also more complex, though a nice product. So far I haven't encountered any context where I couldn't connect to my wireguard tunnel, but YMMV.
- archerx 4y ago
  I’ve been self hosting a nextcloud instance for many years and its been great without any issue. I love it and I use it everyday.
  - benatkin 4y ago
    I gave NextCloud a shot and didn't like it. For one thing whatever I had set up for it was sending too many notifications on Android. So YMMV.
    - archerx 4y ago
      The app sucks, I have been using the web interface exclusively even on mobile.
- throwaway2056 4y ago
  This. Plus: people here calling for Raspberry or Synology do not know 'average' users - People dont know what is ethernet - Most people cant navigate GUI of synology or other stuff - Some of the hn gurus need to work as CS for a week. People get confused what USB-A or USB-C cable. - For hn-gurus with Rpi/nextcloud: These products are sold to average joe that has no clue about tech. - for average joe people, google is internet, facebook is family and whatsapp is chat. - The sales guy that sold it just works for commission. Capitalism. - Same is for WD. They sold the product for $100 8TB so that is the quality one expects.
  - quaintdev 4y ago
    Then we need to work on it to make self hosting as ubiquitous as a TV. Imagine a future where all your photos, videos stay at your house on a box and others who have access can view them from anywhere. The corporations are working in direction where this is never possible but given how they all deal with data this is the only future that will be secure and makes sense.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      >Imagine a future where all your photos, videos stay at your house on a box and others who have access can view them from anywhere. We are slowly working towards such a future and common users by and large will appreciate it, but it's not going to be the future most tech nerds envision it to be.
      - copper-float 4y ago
        What are you referring to?
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        Basically: Convenience and customizability are mutually exclusive. We as tech nerds value our ability to power user, but this is quite simply at odds with the interests of common users. Things like further and further abstractioning of file systems, further and further integrations of operating systems with online accounts and other internet services, further and further "appliance"ing of computer systems, etc.
- CapsAdmin 4y ago
  Although the consequences of failure are not as severe, you could make a similar argument against cooking your own food as the outcome can be unreliable and time consuming. Some enjoy doing it, some just purchase microwave food and some just pay or get someone else to do it for them. Then there are chefs in the media that try to make cooking more accessible with the message that it's not as difficult as people make it out to be. However some pushback/warning against self hosting because we don't yet have a good alternative to reliable "microwave food" is good I guess.
  - bon00r 4y ago
    [flagged]
- mihaaly 4y ago
  "it quickly becomes very insecure and unreliable" As anything else! As the above picture shows. With the added bonus that you are cluless of the state of a Cloud (no insights of its real state, its actual practices, also kept in darkness, only over confident corporate statements). (actually there are quite fine self hosted products with maintainance updates and help where you do not have to be an IT practitioner to use, equal to the level required from Cloud services, just look around)
- qwertox 4y ago
  While I self-host everything, I fully agree with this. If it works and has no internet access, you'll just leave it there, running for a year, two years, when suddenly something changes. Either you need to upgrade the underlying OS to a new major version or some 3rd-party client changes, and you're confronted with a wall of stuff you must do. Or even if it's something as simple as MongoDB, after a patch (not even a minor version bump), no longer being supported on the Raspberry Pi 4 even though MongoDB themselves posted a blog post a couple of months before that change showing how to easily install it on this device.
- Bender 4y ago
  I've been self hosting openssh sftp for decades and not run into any problems with security as of yet but it could be I am just lucky. I do not expose any services to IP's that I do not control with exception to my public SFTP servers but there is nothing sensitive or important on those. The boxes auto-update OS patches but I manually reboot them just to ensure they come back in a happy state. This is just to say that a chroot SFTP server and the lftp client is all one really needs to push backups to wherever with functionality similar to rsync but with slower directory enumeration because there isn't a corresponding sync client on the remote end. That's fine with me since I can be asleep when this occurs. For cell phone backups one of the many SFTP clients is AdminHands but I find anything for cell phones is mediocre at best.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  Hello, can you please expand on how using syncthing out of the box would be deemed insecure? Genuinely concerned ive missed something
rwalle 4y ago
Try sending this URL to your uncle. Hacker news is not the entire world.

0xy 4y ago

Who buys this garbage? I swore off WD and refunded several drives after their SMR scam. I wouldn't touch any of their online services.

kragen 4y ago
there isn't a wide selection of hard disk manufacturers left, and none untainted with the smr scam afaik that is of course no reason to touch their online services
- Latty 4y ago
  WD was kinda the worst for putting it into their NAS product line though, I don't think any of the others were that bad. You are right though, hard drives are kinda all much the same.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    I went Seagate for my NAS's HDDs because they are explicit whether a given drive is SMR or CMR. I say this as someone who up until then always bought WD HDDs.
    - MaKey 4y ago
      I'm giving Toshiba a try now with two MG09 18TB HDDs. 5 year warranty and peak transfer rates of nearly 300 MB/s. I've had bad luck with two Seagate 4TB ST4000DM000 HDDs, they both failed after warranty was over. I think it was a bad model. My other Seagate disks (2x 8TB CMR and 2x 8TB SMR) have been working just fine for a few years.
astral303 4y ago
the consumer has no choice. if you buy an HDD, you gambling.
janpieterz 4y ago
Had to look up[1] what the SMR scam was about, short summary: different disks with lower random I/O performance were sold without being marked as such. 1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...

jsnk 4y ago

"Western Digital is cutting 251 workers in California" https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/11/22/western-digital-latest-valley-company-with-layoffs.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/11/22/western-... A possible contributing cause

MrFoof 4y ago

The reality is WD My Cloud was breached yet again: https://www.pcworld.com/article/1681254/western-digitals-my-cloud-goes-down-after-hack.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/1681254/western-digitals-my-...

Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
Was gonna say that my defualt mindset is now "If something is down for longer than a day, they have been breached!".
COGlory 4y ago
>“Western Digital is currently experiencing a service outage impacting the following products: My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS5, SanDisk ibi, SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger" In what world does a wireless charger need a cloud?
- afavour 4y ago
  “Ixpand” is the clue: it comes bundled with a photo backup service. Presumably the charger itself is working just fine.
- dpedu 4y ago
  Perhaps it does something like the iPhone's "Clean Energy Charging" feature? This requires some sort of internet connection to know when to charge. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213323 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213323
  - patrickthebold 4y ago
    Presumably the phone knows the time and the charger does not need to connect to the internet.
jmathai 4y ago
I worked at WD for about 2 years (via acquisition). I never really used their cloud services for any personal reason - because I either couldn’t get them to work or didn’t trust them. I wouldn’t use their MyCloud NAS devices as a reliable place to store any important data. Their cloud services routinely go down like this. And they just don’t communicate with their users.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

saidinesh5 4y ago

The crazy thing is their MyCloud line up used to support local only operation until an OS upgrade disabled it apparently. Just their MyCloud hard drive + syncthing has been my ideal backup solution for all my devices for about 5 years now. Any document I save on any of my device instantly gets replicated onto all my devices. Any picture/video i take on my phone gets backed up to my NAS automatically. I used to host a browser based file manager and had dynamic dns pointing to that NAS for the rare use case where i wanted to share a file with someone via a link. Such a shame I'll have to re do all this set up if/when i need to move away from that drive...

sureglymop 4y ago
Why not just use syncthing? I do that. You can even set up an encrypted node on e.g. an aws vps. That node won't see any of your files but still any them.
- saidinesh5 4y ago
  I'm currently using syncthing itself on MyCloud. I had to run a little script to enable third party applications on MyCloud and installed syncthing from that. Thanks for the tip about the encrypted node though
NKosmatos 4y ago
Hey I have a WD MyCloud with OS5 (updated to latest release) and it works localy. I've disabled all the silly cloud and online services and I use it perfectly fine as a local NAS. It's people who were using the cloud features that are affected by this hack. To be clear and honest, other vendors have faced similar issues. I remember D-Link many years ago and Synology more recently. We have to accept that all cloud services are susceptible to attacks, downtime and so it's always good to have local (and offsite) backups of your important files.
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  If you have automatic updates turned on, I would still assume you were breached. It can remotely re-enable cloud services and there's all kinds of unknown implementation details.

NKosmatos 4y ago

Another typical corporate status page that has no real information and it’s of no value. Why do companies still have these silly pages that don’t actually provide any helpful information to their users/customers? They also don’t offer info or real support over at their forum as well, same corporate silence https://community.wd.com/ https://community.wd.com/

owyn 4y ago
Because it's a checklist/todo item for most companies. "Oh, Fred, that status page thing, is it done?" "Yep, I got this perl script, it even updates the timestamp automatically! update_status.pl <intensity> <reason>". "Good enough, ship it." (sometime in the future - the site goes down) Oh, where's that perl script? Fred went on vacation...
- expertentipp 4y ago
  Fred was impatiently mumbling about one service, need to refactor it or something. What a maniac. We are busy with kubernaytez and ay-eye. Would a chat work instead of status page perhaps?
  - lionkor 4y ago
    > Would a chat work instead of status page perhaps? That is truly an expertentipp.
  - skeeter2020 4y ago
    Fred has been laid off. Monica and Charles over in Marketing handle status updates now with generic tweets about how we care deeply about our customers and lots of cool emojis
  - alexjplant 4y ago
    Am I the only person on the Earth that enjoys using Kubernetes? Running it yourself or having to deal with buying it from IBM is no fun at all but manaed k8s (GKE, DO, etc) works great and beats the ever-living hell out of managing server state. JMO.

jonplackett 4y ago

Western digital is the brand of drive I wanted one up from back when I was building a 386sx. Funny that anyone wants to buy cloud services from them 30 years later.

xtracto 4y ago
Aaah I remember those darn WD DeathStar disks haha. Who in their right mind still trust this company?

bastard_op 4y ago

So much for trusting the cloud, WD is just another dysfunctional company that can't manage security.

greatgib 4y ago

People should really be clueless or out of their mind to trust this kind of company with their data on the cloud. Company like that have no idea how to do serious storage, for them it is just a checkbox on a "recurring revenue increase" OKR objective.

voytec 4y ago
It's more problematic in some areas, like wireless access points. Any reliable maker these days? Cisco Meraki sends data to their "cloud" (or even has to be managed through cloud services) and so does Ubiquiti hardware.

nickdothutton 4y ago

Surely this will be the end for their cloud storage business. Who would use if after being down for 1 week and zero information provided through their official channels.

hoofhearted 4y ago

Way back in 2012 when I started my last startup, I had setup some quick and easy redundant WD NAS drives lol. I couldn’t ever keep them in sync, the remote piece never worked, and one of the drives died within the first few months lol.. They ended up in the garbage, with a bunch of drill holes through the drives. I quickly throw together a Freenas server with 4 redundant disks, and we never lost data for over a decade after that switch. Freenas scaled with us as we grew, and 4 drives grew into over 32 drives spread over a couple Dell poweredge clusters. When COVID hit and everyone went into lockdown, Freenas saved the day for us once again. I had already setup our storage servers behind a VPN, and when everyone quit coming into the office, they already had all their files synced up to their laptop from Freenas :)

wil421 4y ago
I use FreeNAS with WD Red (non-same) drives and everything works fine. Guessing you used some WD software.
- hoofhearted 4y ago
  Yea, WD makes really good enterprise and NAS grade drives lol.. However back in 2012, we had a laptop that died with about 3 months worth of work gone. I ran out to Microcenter and bought 2 of the WD MyCloud NAS devices. It was like a mini Linux machine with a single NAS drive and an Ethernet port. They worked great for about a month; but they lacked the ability to do auto backups of themselves to another spare MyCloud device. We initially had a quick SOP on how to copy/paste the primary drive to the secondary drive, but the drives became out of sync within a month. Our primary MyCloud device locked up within a month and bricked the drive. We were SOL once again, and only had a semi copy on the backup drive. I bought a pc case, a supermicro board with ECC memory on eBay, and 4 WD Red NAS drives. Problem was solved, and I destroyed the MyCloud devices lol.. WD wasn’t really concerned either when I contacted them. I must say, Tom Lawerence of Lawerence Systems on YouTube was one of the biggest aids for us when we were setting up and scaling our large it systems. https://youtu.be/vxFNBZIAClc https://youtu.be/vxFNBZIAClc
  - 4y ago

guiambros 4y ago

Posted earlier this week [1], but didn't get much traction. TL;DR: yes, they were breached. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35449006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35449006

dolmen 4y ago

Terms of use: YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT USE OF THE SERVICES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK AND THAT THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO SATISFACTORY QUALITY, PERFORMANCE, ACCURACY, AND EFFORT IS WITH YOU. ALL PARTS OFTHE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED BY WESTERN DIGITALON AN “AS IS,” “WITHALL FAULTS,” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS ONLY, WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. WESTERNDIGITAL HEREBY EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL REPRESENTATIONS,WARRANTIES, AND CONDITIONS WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICES (INCLUDING THE USE, PERFORMANCE, AND SUPPORT THEREOF), WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE,INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, MERCHANTABILITY, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.WESTERN DIGITAL DOES NOT MAKE ANY ASSURANCES WITH REGARD TO THE ACCURACY OF THE RESULTS OR OUTPUT THAT DERIVES FROM THE SERVICES. Source: https://www.westerndigital.com/legal/terms-of-use https://www.westerndigital.com/legal/terms-of-use

KMnO4 4y ago
Random question; why are terms written in all caps?
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  To make them harder to read. Edit: In this case it appears they’re using it for emphasis, since the majority of the ToS is in normal caps, but it was definitely a deliberate dark pattern until very recently to make the ToS hard to read.
  - Closi 4y ago
    This isn’t true - caps are a legal standard in the USA to indicate that this section is higher-importance for the reader. It’s actually a legal obligation to make your terms “conspicuous”. So it’s actually supposed to be the opposite - to meet a legal obligation to highlight to users that they should pay particular notice to certain sections.
    - rationalist 4y ago
      PARAGRAPHS OF ALL CAPS is harder to read for some people.

eob 4y ago

I lost a decade of family photos using a Western Digital RAID-in-a-box setup (WD MyCloud or something) Both hard disks fried at the same time.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Both hard disks fried at the same time. I'm sorry for your family pictures: it's the one personal thing I've got copies of everywhere (online / offline / on-site / off-site). But... Regarding HDDs/SSDs failing at the same time: the common mantra is to be very careful of disks from the same batch. There have been SSDs too failing after a certain amount of hours of usage. I like to use different brands or, at the very least, different models from the same brand. Now I'm not saying it's what happened in our case: if they literally fried, then it's another problem.
rvba 4y ago
Question from a laic. When someone setups a RAID they usually buy disks from the same manufacturer. And those might stop working at the same time (e.g. warranty for 24 months, so they 'strangely' fry in 25th). Is it possible to mix disks from different manufacturers in a RAID?
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Linux/FreeBSD software RAID (using OS tools or things like FreeNAS) doesn't care what the devices are, just that the space makes sense (e.g. for RAID1 you need 2 volumes of the same size). I'm not sure to the extent hardware RAID cares these days. NAS boxes from hard drive manufacturers might care about the drive vendor, but I've never used them.
- jf93ap29sh 4y ago
  Technically you can mix & match as long as they are of the same capacity. Some NAS appliances might not like that tho. But a way around what you mention, keeping it to a single manufacturer: is to buy the drives from different retailers, hopefully geographically dispersed, a few weeks apart, to ensure you get drives from different manufacturing batches. Unless there's a systemic issue with the entire product line (unlikely to go unnoticed) you spread out the risk of a single bad batch that way. Maybe overkill, but that's what I did many years ago.

turnsout 4y ago

If you're on this orange website, give yourself the gift of building a TrueNAS (nee FreeNAS) setup. I cobbled one together in 2014 and it's still running nonstop. I've replaced two drives with absolutely zero drama, and it took about 20 minutes each time.

jimt1234 4y ago

Around 10 years ago, when cloud storage services got going, I copied all my stuff to Google Drive, thinking this was gonna solve all my problems. Well, 10 years later, in 2023, I've finally finished copying all my stuff back down to my laptop and storing anything important on 3 different 256-GB removable USB drives. I keep some stuff in Google Drive, mostly throw-away stuff, like goofy pictures I wanna share. But anything important is local now. I just got tired of weird policy changes, sometimes data would go missing, only to magically reappear a few days later, and I just lost trust in all cloud storage services. And this incident with WD is a great example of that.

ksec 4y ago

Now that Apple made Cloud Storage encryption a thing. They should remake the Time Machine and allow user to backup their iOS and Mac on Time Machine, while upselling you iCloud as Off Site Backup.

realworldperson 4y ago

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