I’ve long used Western Digital and SanDisk drives, moving with them from their spinning days to the solid state era. I now have three portable SSDs acting as the Time Machine backups for my desktop and for my own and my wife’s laptops. And I’m about to buy their replacements (or rather, the second disks in an alternating back up scheme).
Why?
…Numerous owners of the drives, including Ars Technica’s own Lee Hutchinson, encountered a problem where the drives seemingly erased data and became unreadable. Lee saw two drives fill approximately halfway before showing read and write errors. Disconnecting and reconnecting showed the drive was unformatted and empty. Wiping and formatting didn’t resolve things.
Complaints about the drives littered SanDisk’s forums and Reddit (examples here, here, here, and here) for at least four months before Western Digital released a firmware fix in late May. The page for the update claims products currently shipping are not affected. But the company never noted customers’ lost data claims.
It did, however, name the affected drives:
-
SanDisk Extreme Portable 4TB (SDSSDE61-4T00)
-
SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 4TB (SDSSDE81-4T00)
-
SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 2TB (SDSSDE81-2T00)
-
SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable 1TB (SDSSDE81-1T00)
-
Western Digital My Passport 4TB (WDBAGF0040BGY)Subsequent reports from The Verge, which received a replacement SSD, and some Reddit users, though, claimed the drives were still broken. Western Digital didn’t answer requests for comment about newfound grievances.
I’ve never bought anything terribly large, so at least the sunk cost isn’t too great, but I do have a couple of the listed 1 TB problem drives. For now, I’ve switched over to some old spinning disks (Western Digital ones, as it happens)… but they’re old and the reason I switched to the SSDs was because of the alleged greater mean time between failures.
All this by way of saying be careful: any data you care about should (in my belt/suspenders opinion) enjoy multiple backups, and if you are relying on SanDisk/WD and, like me, have been oblivious to this long-running issue, take a look at your drives and protect yourself.
This thread is as open as the Linux kernel.
image: Adolph von Menzel, Omnibus (memory), 1848
RepubAnon
There’s always storing backup data on DVDs…
Mr. Bemused Senior
Always have a backup. All media are subject to failures. DVDs too.
[Tape, baby. Nah, just kidding.]
Alison Rose
Sometimes I envy people who lived in a time where their most advanced “technology” was like, the light bulb.
Splitting Image
I don’t think I have any of those drives, but thanks for the heads-up. You never know when you will get bitten by one of these.
Jay
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/what-you-need-to-know-about-bc-wildfires-aug-18-2023-1.6940311
The fire jumped across Okanogan Lake last night.
The Ross Moore fire blew up yesterday and is headed south, causing more evacuations.
The Lytton fire jumped the Fraser river yesterday and is burning on both banks.
Johnb
If you are going to go to an alternating backup scheme you should make a habit of storing the alternate device off-site (in your office) when you rotate. Ideally you’d have a three-drive rotating system, so that one drive is always remote. That is, two drives live in the office at a time, except when you are in the process of swapping out the current primary backup.
MattF
I’ve stuck with spinning disks for backup, out of inertia rather than any special wisdom. And, so far so good for me. The canonical backup recommendation is two local backups, one hot and one cold, on different media, plus a remote backup. There’s also some automatic iCloud backups that I haven’t tried to figure out.
The basic philosophy is that everything will break and will have to be replaced, sooner or later. Keeping it all current and working is the cost of doing business.
Bethanyanne
Offsite backups via a service like Backblaze is my solution.
Burnspbesq
It’s interesting that WD and SanDisk SSDs would be affected, but not their corporate siblings G-Technology. I have a backup of my approximately 3.5 Tb music library on one of those, mostly for convenience; the backup I care about is offsite with AWS. The instance that I use to actually play music is on two WD spinners inside a Synology server attached to the wireless router.
randy khan
A couple of thoughts:
If you don’t have a backup system – hardware or cloud – SET ONE UP NOW! I speak as someone who very luckily had done a backup just a day before my wife’s hard drive crashed irretrievably. And “system” means a regular plan that you implement.
Always have at least two backups, for the reasons that Tom makes clear.
Ideally, at least one of your backups should live somewhere other than where you keep your computer. For my own computer, I historically have kept one backup disk at home and one at work because it’s a laptop and I can take it back and forth, but one at home and one on the cloud works, too
Also: Drives are cheap these days – less than $100 at a place like Costco for a ton of capacity. There’s no excuse not to have at least one backup if you have any data you care about.
Brachiator
Thanks for this info. I had heard about the SanDisk problems, but didn’t know that some My Passport drives were also affected.
Rand Careaga
Good to know. I have a dozen or fifteen external SSDs, most of them Samsungs of varying capacities. The single SanDisk unit is lower capacity—500GB—than the models listed in this post, but I’ll take some time to review its contents and make certain that there’s nothing there I’d grieve to lose.
I brought home my first external hard disk, a whopping ten megabytes, about thirty-eight years ago. It set me back $700. At those prices, a 1TB SSD would cost a cool seventy million.
grumbles
Just one of your mostly-lurker professional IT folks chiming in to say:
If you don’t test your backups, you don’t have a backup.
It happens way too often: People religiously back up, but something subtle is wrong, and they never notice because they never try to restore a file until they need it. And then it isn’t.
Don’t let that happen to you.
Just every once in a while, restore a random file. Make sure it works. Because a false sense of safety is a dangerous thing.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@grumbles: good advice! My motto [not original with me]: anything you haven’t tested doesn’t work.
JAFD
Salutations, Jackals and gentlepeople !
Helping out a friend’s research project here. So, may I ask:
1: Do you live where hard-boiled eggs pickled in beet juice are part of the ‘folk cuisine’ (ie, you can get them at local supermarket) ?
2: You can get them, but would take unusual shopping ?
3: You know they exist, but getting some ?
4: What the heck are you talking about, JAFD ?
5: And, if you answered 1 or 2, whereabouts do you live, (region, metropolitan area …) ?
Thanks, very much, for whatever help you can give me with this.
PS – For more info: Link
Mr. Bemused Senior
@JAFD: zOMG! Childhood memory: my grandmother had them. NYC. Today, I have no idea.
Citizen Alan
FYI, my furniture finally arrived in Fresno … except for the stuff I’m still missing. Nothing i can’t live without, but somehow this idiot company lost a full-size mattress. I am also missing a glass table top and at least one box of momentos.
A big thank you, though, to Water Girl who contacted me and offered to hook me up with a local Fresnoan who was getting rid of old furniture. :)
Doug R
@RepubAnon:
Most new laptops don’t have an optical drive.
So the 1T drives are problematic? I was looking at buying one since this laptop has a 256GB SSD. I have put in a 256GB micro SD card in the card slot and moved all the pictures I use there to save up room for everything else.
raven
What do you Mac users use? I’ve never been able to figure Time Machine out, I have used it but never actually been able to retrieve anything. I went ahead and bought a bunch of TB’s of iCloud and ti drives me crazy trying to figure out what’s on my machine and what’s in the cloud!
azlib
My backup system is a combination of rsync to a backup server nightly. Rsync writes to two RAID5 spinning disk arrays with the btrfs filesystem onboard which allows me to do daily snapshots which allows me to go back in time. The server with the RAID arrays is in a separate building. All this is automated via cron jobs. Okay, now you know I am an IT geek.
Alison Rose
@JAFD: Well, this won’t help your dataset, but neither I (lifelong Californian) nor my mother (first 26 years lived in New York) have ever heard of such a thing. I asked her if they sold them in kosher delis, and she said not to her knowledge.
Adam L Silverman
This is what I’m using:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09VLK9W3S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
Baud
@RepubAnon: Digital tape.
Alison Rose
@Citizen Alan: Yay for the arrived furniture and boo for the lost stuff. I hope they are at least able to find the memento box :( I’d be right pissed if something like that got lost.
narya
@JAFD: I’ve actually had them! I grew up in NW NJ; I think my mother made them? I can ask her if you really want me to.
MattF
@Rand Careaga: I recall a Byte magazine review of a 10MB hard disk. They didn’t have 10MB of data to test it, so the just filled up the disk with ‘@‘ characters and then retrieved them. We’ve got bigger disks now and bigger data.
robtrim
Google, whether it’s via Android or the Chrome browser, has become a monster as far as invading your privacy and recording what you’re doing. But, it does sync your various devices and backup stuff to the cloud.
Apple has its Time Machine backup system that is pretty transparent – it does, of course, depend on the storage devices that are connected to your Mac. I’ve never had trouble with an SSD, but the spinning disk drives are equivalent to Russian Roulette.
CaseyL
@Citizen Alan: Yikes! Very good news to hear that most of your stuff has arrived, My guess would be that the missing items never made it onto the truck.
How do you like Fresno so far?
Mr. Bemused Senior
@JAFD:
It seems Amazon will be happy to sell you some (beet “flavored”)
raven
Roger Moore
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
And test your backups. There’s nothing more devastating than needing to go to your backup, only to discover the backup is bad, too. If you haven’t tried recovering stuff from your backup, you don’t really know if it’s any good. Ask me how I know.
rekoob
@Citizen Alan: For what it’s worth, Fresno was featured on Marketplace earlier this week:
Marketplace 14 Aug 2023
Hope you’re getting settled in!
MattF
@raven: I use TM + two local HDs. One HD for TM, the other for a weekly SuperDuper cloning of my Mac’s storage. And Backblaze for a cloud backup. I’ve used TM on a couple of occasions to retrieve a single file. It’s confusing but does seem to do the job, eventually.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Roger Moore
Yes. See above.
robtrim
@raven: I’ve really only used Time Machine when I bought a new Mac. It makes transferring your old Mac data pretty easy.
And I use the Mac’s encryption app to encrypt my main drive and any backup drives. I may be wrong, but encryption seems to me to be a pretty robust form of data protection.
raven
@MattF: Wow, I’m not sure my needs are that great. I have 30,000 pictures in Flickr and my music is in iTunes.
raven
@robtrim: Thx
Dagaetch
A question for all of you with good backup strategy – what is it, if not work, that you are backing up? Because every time I look at doing personal backups, other than for my raw image files, it’s like…tax returns, copies of insurance policies, and other documentation that I keep on Dropbox anyway, adding up to maybe a couple hundred MBs. Hardly seems worth the effort, especially since most of it is available from other sources as well.
Tom Levenson
Just to confess: I have a hodgepodge approach. I have Apple cloud storage of my desktop; Dropbox for all my non photographic data and some of my photos and (usually) two Time Machine back ups of each of my computers (the desktop and the laptop, which started out as a clone of the desktop and is slowly drifting away from that commonality).
The Dropbox functions (in my head at least) as my off site backup. The Apple storage just kinda happened.
And yes: test the back ups. I just retrieved a word document off the current desktop Time Machine disk, so for now, at least, we seem to have the minimum necessary functionality.
Onkel Fritze
I’ve had one of these WD ‘My Passport’ things go bad on me a few years ago. A new one too. Won’t buy their stuff anymore.
Baud
Eh, I really wouldn’t mind so much if I had to start life over again.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Baud: in this world? Once is enough, thanks.
I never do anything twice
Roger Moore
@Dagaetch:
For me it is the raw image files. I have 20+ years of photographs on my hard drive, and that takes up a boatload of space, even though I’m not as prolific a photographer as I used to be. It can also be useful, though not essential, to back up stuff that in theory could be recovered somehow but would be a lot of effort. For example, some people have huge music or video collections that they’ve ripped from physical media they bought back when that was the standard way of acquiring those things. I could go back and re-rip all my old music files from the CDs, but that would be enough effort that it’s worth my time and money to have a backup strategy.
Anyway
@JAFD:
I’ve seen them – they are available in the “Amish” markets in the MD/PA/DE area. I’ve never tried one …they’re too beet-adjacent for me.
SoupCatcher
@JAFD:
Does it count if you know which restaurant/bar to go if you want eggs pickled in beet juice?
Whenever I have a craving and I’m in Southern California, I’ll go to
Philippe’s in Los Angeles or Joe Jost’s in Long Beach.
robtrim
@Dagaetch: I lost a ton of photos six or eight years ago to a hard disk crash. It wasn’t the end of the world, but why risk it. Whenever there is some kind of manmade or natural disaster where people lose their homes, I always think of the personal computers destroyed and gone.
Backing up to the cloud makes sense.
NotMax
@JAFD
Red pickled eggs – yummmmm. White pickled eggs – blech.
Not in markets here AFAIK. Easy enough to make ’em at home, though. Hint: Storing the jar initially in a cool, dark place while they pickle turns out the best.
Steeplejack
@JAFD:
#4 here (NoVA).
CAM-WA
@raven: You can retrieve (restore) files/folders from Time Machine in one of two ways:
NotMax
Backup? Like Fahrenheit 451, I memorize the ones and zeroes annually.
//
trollhattan
Went a little nuts with my home desktop, which is photo-centric and needs a ton of space. Has a pair of 2TB SSDs (Samsung) two internal HDDs, one 6TB one 18TB, four external HDDs, one an active backup (twin drive My Book).
Also have a NAS that I have not restored to its function since the old desktop went to sing with the choir incarnate. It’s a Synology and I’m not fond of their backup software, which seems obtuse and has a tendency to replicate the backup back on the PC being backed up, causing all kinds of storage and version control problems.
Where’s my 16 YO propellerhead?
MattF
@Dagaetch: I’ve got personal photos and videos, a large pile of financial data, music, ebooks, and movies— in other words, the usual. I’ve made a few attempts to figure out where this data actually sits on my Mac, but that turns out to be just about impossible— the data itself is buried many levels under the surface and then encoded and retrieved in ways that are also buried, but differently.
In addition, modern program development environments and software stacks are stored in bizarrely complex ways. The only way to safely back them up is completely.
Omnes Omnibus
When I was doing the final draft of my law review article in law school, I saved to the hard drive and three different disks every 15 minutes. If I’d thought of it, I would have used disks from different manufacturers.
StringOnAStick
@JAFD: For #1, I’ve lived in CO most of my life and now central Oregon, and I have never seen hard boiled eggs pickled in beet juice; I am intrigued.
RandomMonster
Let’s just say I have some personal reasons why I want you to buy Seagate or LaCie drives.
To add to everyone’s sound backup advice here, it’s a good idea to have backups to multiple external drives as well as cloud destinations. Don’t wait until you’ve lost all of your pet pictures!
rikyrah
Crocs for dogs?😳😳
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8No1RRk/
Rand Careaga
@raven: I use “Carbon Copy Cloner,” and periodically create a bootable backup of my entire startup disk (itself an SSD). This has been my practice ever since, a few years ago, I almost hosed the said startup disk. On that occasion I fortunately quit before attempting remedial measures which, in this instance, really would have killed the drive, and was ultimately able to restore the status quo ante, but it made a believer out of me. CCC is inexpensive, easy to use, and the licensing terms are extremely generous.
StringOnAStick
@NotMax: How long does the pickling process take? I’m assuming it has to be refrigerated during this time.
trollhattan
@Onkel Fritze:
My bete noire has been Seagate, which I’ve 10-foot polled into the Pacific. WD has gradually acquired other companies and I don’t think are quite as reliable as they once were, while bits of Toshiba are currently being passed around like a can of Pringles and I do not know what becomes of their HDD component.
NotMax
@StringOnAStick
Any low-slung, stand alone cinder block buildings with beer brand neon signs blocking the windows (or almost entirely blacked out windows) in the area?
if so, probably a dusty jar o’ eggs behind the bar.
;)
NotMax
@StringOnAStick
Refrigerate for 2 weeks, minimum.
Dangerman
Visiting Family in SoCal. Well, maybe WAS visiting Family in SoCal.
Locally 3 to 5 inches with isolated 10″ in spots. Probably in the Foothills. Guess where my Family lives.
Love my Family as much as the next guy but I might be bugging out. I’ll leave my umbrella. No ark to spare.
Anoniminous
@JAFD:
Not part of the local cuisine (NM); have no idea if we can purchase since we make them.
Percysowner
I locally backup to a WD 2 TB, and auto-backup to ICloud. I just dug out my old Seagate Drive, so I’ll backup there as well. Thanks for the tip.
Chief Oshkosh
@rekoob: Fresno was one of the up-and-coming small cities highlighted by the Fallows’ book
https://www.theatlantic.com/our-towns
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36741981-our-towns
Gravenstone
@JAFD: 1, although I prefer to make my own.
Steeplejack
@Citizen Alan:
Have you named and shamed the moving company, so that none of us ever uCompany, 😬
El Muneco
@MattF: For those who might be thinking it – yes, there were scanned pictures of bikini-clad young women circulating at the time, but those files are only about 1mb in size…
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
This is why I never trashed my 8-track tapes, I knew it would become useful again
NotMax
@El Muneco
Zaftig subjects, 1.5 mb.
;)
skerry
@JAFD: 1 – Maryland
Roger Moore
@Rand Careaga:
Interesting. I run Linux at home, so it’s easy to keep my personal files on a separate drive from the system drive (/ and /usr). Because of that, I never bother to backup the system drive; it’s easy enough to reinstall everything if I need to replace it. My personal data (/home) is not easily replaced, though, so I have a rigorous backup process for that.
I would encourage people who run Windows to try to do something similar. Windows wants to put as much stuff as possible into your user folder, but you should resist. Instead, put everything at least on another partition and ideally on a completely separate drive. That will make it much easier to transplant all your files the next time you replace your computer.
The Pale Scot
I have always used OWC, a Mac parts outfit, never had a problem with anything I’ve bought there in 20 yrs +
trollhattan
@Dangerman: Hillary!!! {shakes fist}
Somebody had to. We have showers predicted Sunday-Monday, something that does not happen in August.
trollhattan
@JAFD: Dive bars of my CA Central Valley yoot days often had a big ol’ jar of pickled eggs on the bar or the backbar. The more coots in a bar, the more likely there would be eggs. Also, a swamp cooler for summer.
Never partook. I think back in the day when you could eat for free if you were paying for drinks, they were pretty common. Cheapest protein possible.
In my new-to-me office’s neighborhood is a pawnshop with liquor store on one side, bar open at 6:00 a.m. on the other. Bet they have pickled eggs.
PBK
@JAFD: 1, Brooklyn.
Sister Golden Bear
Data should never live in one location ask me how I know.
I currently use three methods:
Finally any “archive” (things like old photos that I don’t access often get moved to a separate drive, that’s duped to yet another drive. Neither are turned on unless o need access stuff on them.
Excessive? Undoubtedly. But it gives me peace of mind.
Forgot to mention I also use iCloud so that’s an additional backup for my day-to-day files.
zhena gogolia
@RandomMonster: I have LaCie.
I hate the cloud.
raven
@Rand Careaga: I did years ago and I still don’t know what a “bootable backup” is!!!
Eunicecycle
@JAFD: my husband loves pickled eggs in beet juice! He makes his own, using canned beets and hard boiled eggs. I think he adds vinegar. We see them occasionally in stores, in the deli section of grocery stores around here. We live in Ohio, north east part, near Amish country.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I use nothing but Samsung SSD/NVMe drives in all of the systems that I build (own & customer). They had a problem with the early EVO drives that they rectified. I’ve lost one Samsung EVO a few years ago (customer’s system) but it was backed up so easily restored.
Backups and more backups! Also periodically check your drive SMART status with something like Crystal Disk Info. This can give you a heads up to a failing drive before it fails.
pacem appellant
This is an apropos time to plug my single Substack post, The persistence of memory: Permanent data loss in the Information Age. TL;DR our data are jucked. If you didn’t write it down, forget about it.
WaterGirl
@JAFD:
4.
Paul in KY
@raven: We just live in the iCloud, man….
worn
Many thanks for the heads up, Tom; I was completely unaware of this issue. I bought one of these drives last year and have been actively using it to store some very important data (to me, at least).
I guess it’s time to source different drive. I am not very happy about that.
wmd
I’ve been using WD Blue 2 TB NVMe drives for backups. One gets plugged in biweekly for a day, the other one gets hourly backups the rest of the time. A third one holds previous MacBook Pro’s time machine back up. That one is likely going to be reformatted and used for an occasional offsite backup.
Seanly
I got annoyed with the backup external drives not doing incremental backups but just clogging the SSD with dozens of copies of files that didn’t even change. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to do a “factory reset” on the drives. I bit the bullet and switched to an online backup system. Loss all of my files back in 2007 (so not a ton). The files weren’t such a big deal except for all of the digital & scanned photos that I had at that point. Lesson learned…
In addition, I still have a Seagate 5TB SSD backup and 2 other working laptops (bought myself a nice gaming laptop when I got a new job w/ a 23% bump) that have 97% of the same files on them. So I’ve got triple redundancy backup stuff going on.
cckids
Oh yes. The month after my son passed away, we were looking for photos, many stored on our backup drive, which had multiple user sign-ins, for different family members. It’s power source had crapped out; we took it to a recovery place, with ALL sign-ins/passwords; they recovered stuff from one sign-in, then trashed it. I’ve never been so close to murdering another human.
Luckily, my fabulous daughter had at some time, copied almost everything to her laptop, so we were able to get most of the stuff back. But . . . it is a gut-wrenching discovery if you believe your stuff has vanished into the ether.
Ruckus
When I owned a business it was critical to back up everything. Prior to computers being widely available it was on paper stored in Bankers Boxes, in a location that was unlikely to catch on fire. After computers became widely available and useable I followed the previous method – a hardcopy in a box. If I was doing this today I would have 2 backup drives of different brands so that if one had manufacturing/reliability issues I wouldn’t be screwed. A photographer today would likely be one of the hardest things and I might have 3 separate drives from different manufacturers. It seems to me that there is enough feedback to find out if a manufacturer was at least reasonably reliable.
cckids
@JAFD: Late here, but there’s a small deli/grocery store in Reno, NV – Eastern European focus; I’ve seen them there. Can I remember the name? Of course not.
Brachiator
A company I worked for offered cloud backup to tax preparers who used our services.
One guy had a local backup stored off site. A rare flood damaged both his office and the place where he had the local backup stored.
But he was able to restore from the cloud and get running again fairly quickly.
Also, I recall reading about an author who did not have an off-site backup who lost the draft of their novel during the Oakland CA fire years ago.
If you have any data that is important, back it up.
Betty
@Jay: So sorry to hear the situation remains so dire. I do hope conditions change very soon.
sab
@Eunicecycle: My stepdaughter was sent into foster care when she was 4 and her single mother was institutionalized with very bad MS. Her happiest memories from her short time with her mother was her mom buying her those beet pickled eggs. Ohio.
sab
@JAFD: See #93. Akron Ohio. We still have them in local grocery stores and convenience stores, but they aren’t everywhere like they used to be. I don’t much like them, but I have made them using juice from pickled beets. Pretty common across NE and central Ohio, possibly into western PA.
NWO Joe
I grew up in the Dakotas and definitely remember pickled eggs at the neighborhood bar. Sausages too (vile
little things).
Storage… I have backups everywhere. One Drive, backups on iCloud for the iPhones, and a couple of old WD MyBooks. I have just recently entered the world of SSD externals; built a couple to try out from one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08X4XL71S?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
And one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07MNFH1PX?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
which gives me a 2 tb drive with a 5 year warranty for about 70 bucks. Assembled and formatted in about three minutes.
I have generally built my own storage unless good quality inexpensive stuff is available. I’ve generally had good luck.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@JAFD: Pickled Red Beets eggs are a thing here, We have homemade ones in our fridge now and almost all the time actually. My wife and I both like them. Although our latest batch had to make do with canned beets instead of cooked fresh ones which have much better and more flavor.
I’ve seen the store bought ones occasionally in big jars, but I don’t remember when or where, but I expect most of the locally owned grocery stores* here in the Berks-Lancaster County part of Pensylvania would have them.
ryk
@JAFD: I know people around here (St. Louis area) that like to buy the spicy pickled beets and then, after they eat the beets, use the juice to pickle eggs
Urza
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I deal with literally millions of drives for work. Samsungs are the only brand that do not have one problem or another frequently. We use too many to only go with 1 supplier, but they are the gold standard.
alhutch
I’ve been using Samsung T7 portable SSDs as offsite backup drives since a WD Elements HD drive I was using starting acting flaky. I have 3 of the T7 (1 & 2 TB models) and have been very happy with them (one used daily, other 2 monthly/quarterly).
smintheus
Three weeks ago my Western Digital My Passport for Mac became unreadable and declared it was blank, though it had years of backups on it. Are they offering replacements?
Fortunately, a few months ago I went old school for no particular reason and burned all my current files onto several CDs.
Another Scott
@Doug R: USB optical drives are cheap. $25 for a decent LG writer. Archival optical disks that one can trust might be a concern (I’ve seen writeable CDs that look really weird after sitting around a few years).
It’s always something. ;-)
I don’t (yet) have a formal backup strategy. We’ve got a 4-bay Synology NAS (with WD Gold Enterprise drives – don’t skimp on important hard drives!) that does TimeMachine backups of our Macs at home, and some stuff (photos, tax stuff) gets informally backed up there. I need to prune a bunch of ancient stuff, and implement a more formal strategy… One of these days!
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@raven: When TimeMachine actually works the way it’s supposed to, it’s magic. My trouble with it is, if it can’t find the server where it wants to save stuff, or can’t find a previous backup on the network, then it’s not clear how to fix it. So you (or at least I) have to make a new backup. And having a new machine look at and use an old backup is mysterious. All of this was a few years ago – we’ve not had obvious errors since we started using TM with a Synology NAS (DS918).
Like a lot of Apple stuff, when it works, it’s great. If there are any problems at all, it can be very frustrating to try to fix. (Fortunately, we’ve never yet needed to retrieve anything from a TM backup…)
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
RaflW
Late to this. I just put in my S/N at WD’s support site, and it said “no firmware update needed.” Box & manual tucked away far under the stairs, but I believe it’s a 1TB physical hard drive (and only 30% full – I don’t actually do that much on my Mac).
I’m not all that belt-and-suspenders, I don’t swap between two drives or anything. All my mail is backed up since its Gmail. And most of my photos are cloud-backed.
Should I panic? (Kidding.) I’m sure I should buy a new backup device, this one is as old as my mac … a mid-2013 Air still running Mojave 10.14.6.
I have actually been planning to bump up and OS or two, but want a reliable backup first. Maybe after Labor Day. Or I’ll just buy a new Air. It’s been, oh!, 10 years.
Torrey
@JAFD:
Pretty sure I’ve seen them at the Butcher Block Shoppe in Chambersburg, PA. Used to frequent that area. Currently, I just occasional that area.