WD My Book Duo RAID1 WARNING!

I've made videos in the past talking about the importance of backing up your files specifically getting a hard drive in a raid one configuration I've actually recommended this hard drive right here there's two discs inside of here and you can set it up as a raid one array so that whatever is written to one drive gets written to the other one automatically so that if any disc were to ever fail you'd have the other one as a backup obviously it's one unit so if the house burnt down or it the whole thing blew up you would lose all your files but at least if one disc were to fail you'd have them on the other one you could get them back at least that's what's supposed to happen but specifically with these Western Digital maybook Duos and potentially with other raid one uh drives you want to make sure you don't do what I did I made a very uh bad mistake I would say so I've bought maybe about 10 of these for work and they've all worked incredibly well we have client projects on them they've worked great and that's why I've kept buying more of them and you can actually get these up to 16 tabt now and if you put that in a raid one that's 8 tab uh space that you have available well I bought some of these for personal use as well this is what I use for all my YouTube uh videos so this is uh on one of these drives back there that's to say it was working well until one of them suddenly disappeared off my desktop I was using one of these raid drives normally it was it was a newer Drive I had just gotten had it for like a month or two was using using it no problems and then one day I go to my computer and it's unmounted it's gone it's not there on the desktop the operating system cannot see it now I'm on a Mac so I'm using the Mac OS go into dis utility it's not there nothing can be seen the drive was not dropped uh nothing happened to it to my knowledge it was just sitting on the desk minding its own business no damage whatsoever but suddenly it's just gone so I think well maybe one of the drives has failed so I need to kind of use that raid setup to get my files back however everything I do I cannot access the files I try one disc I try the other disc I do some uh Drive checks with the software that Western Digital supplies with the drive itself there's some kind of checking that you can do to make sure everything's in good work in condition it said it wasn't you know it was like kind of failing the test that I was running on it but it didn't tell me what was wrong it didn't tell me how to fix it it just for some reason it was broken uh one day even though it was working great the day before and I had no idea what had happened so I go to Google I start doing a little bit of research trying to figure out what's happened very very difficult especially in like a niche field where you know it's not a common consumer device you know most people your average user is not uh doing any kind of raid setup and there are so many different types of hard drives out there that this is a very specific problem and so it was very difficult tracking down a solution in fact I didn't even find a solution online so that gives me the the other option of calling up Western Digital and going through their phone tech support well of course they're no help because if you're familiar with any kind of tech support it takes a long time to get to the right person and it can be very challenging having to repeat your story over and over and over again and even then people don't really understand what's happened so for you to understand hopefully you can follow what I did first of all I tested the discs inside they were still spinning there was no clicking no obvious signs of disc failure disc seemed to be in good working order but still no files the one thing I did find on Google doing some research was that the enclosure on these can fail as well because you have two discs inside but you also have the enclosure and kind of the circuit board inside that runs the raid setup and kind of manages the data and lets you it's it's the RAID controller and that can fail as well and that's what I thought it happened so the obvious solution would be to replace the enclosure and because I have like 10 or 11 or 12 of these laying around I put the discs in another enclosure thinking that this enclosure had failed and I put it in the other enclosure still no luck nothing worked I also back there have a standard like hard drive dock where you can just put a hard drive the actual disc uh one of these that's inside you can pop one of those out put it in the dock and read it on the computer still no luck no matter what I did I could not get access to the files now this was a newer drive and like I said it was for personal use so the footage and and stuff that was on there was not extremely important still valuable obviously but it would have been much worse if it was a client project or an actual professional thing that I had done rather than just some YouTube videos I I ended up losing some thumbnails for some of my videos and I couldn't recreate them because obviously the footage was gone and anyway that's a whole separate story so there's a series of my videos that have weird looking thumbnails if you're wondering why that happened that's exactly why cuz I didn't have the thumbnails anymore they were deleted so uh everything I do every experiment every test I run every Google search I do turns up nothing I reach out to Western Digital on Twitter I send them an email to their tech support I call them um I get in touch with Amazon which is where I bought this drive Amazon was extremely helpful they basically were like well we can't fix it but we can send you a new one if you send that one back so that was really awesome that I was able to get a replacement drive for no cost um which is great but still my files are gone and what really concerned me about this was yeah I lost some personal stuff that I didn't really care about that much but what if the same problem happened to one of the work drives something that a client has their footage on one of these drives now I'm freaking out because there's like 10 of these all with client stuff on it and I'm like if this same problem happens to one let alone maybe even all of them how am I going to recover it because there seems to be no solution I even have uh some recovery software called disc drill there's a bunch of different options out there for you know hard drive recovery software uh that's the one I have I even have the pro version you know I've paid for it at one point and and I ran that on the discs still no luck no files no data so what went wrong how did this happen was it an enclosure failure was it a disc failure well the part of the story that I had forgotten about that I did differently because I said I had 10 of these and I did something different with this drive when I first got it all the other drives I formatted as HFS plus J which is kind of the Mac journaled format for the raid one array in the software that supplied with these drives you can format as HFS plus J or you can also format as X fat and I thought I would try out X fat because X fat is compatible with both Mac and windows and I thought you know if I ever get a Windows PC I want to make sure I can use the hard drive on it I don't want to be stuck in a Mac format having to buy another hard drive copy stuff over to that X fat version so I'll just I'll I'll make it X fat and that'll be okay well I didn't really think of that uh as being a problem because it was an option in the softare Ware and so and it worked just fine for a month or two but then something else happened we got another drive like this at work and you know we thought oh well let's just do it as X fat so we do it as X fat and it's not visible on the [Music] network so these two pieces of information the fact that it wasn't visible on our local network the work drive and then my personal one just disappearing from the computer altogether hm two uh places where a Drive was magically invisible with a no real solution well this got me thinking perhaps it's an issue with X fat and sure enough when I start searching for that specific you know raid One X fat you start finding information that says that xat is not as reliable as the journal versions uh yes it's cross- compatible and yes it's got no problem on Windows but you know some some people have said that if you lose power or you pull the USB without ejecting that you can actually corrupt the system architecture and I don't know how much of that is true but I'm I'm pretty sure it was an issue with xat because when I took this drive I basically cut my losses there was there was no help there was nothing I could do recovery software wasn't working I even called local you know data recovery Specialists and they were like it's $250 for an evaluation I'm like it's not worth $250 to just evaluate the drive and see if they can even do anything with it I really exhausted all of my resources I I basically just said I'm going to reformat the drive and see if I can get the discs and the enclosure back up and running and that's exactly what I did I reformatt it but this time I did it as HFS plus J and what do you know it works again the discs are good the enclosure is good everything works just fine so was it an issue with X fat I'm I'm really uh suspicious of it of it that was the culprit of the that was the key problem the common denominator in all of the situations was the X fat format and now the drive works great all the other drives have been no problem over the years in fact I even took uh some of those drives and I was like you know what if one of these were to fail could I take the discs out because people were saying online that if the enclosure fails on one of these my book Duos specifically the my book Duo people were saying that there's some kind of encryption on there so if the enclosure fails you can't read the drives uh when you they're taken out you're basically uh out of luck and that made like no sense to me but it seemed to exactly what I was experiencing I took the drives out I couldn't read them on any other uh enclosure and that's what I was assuming that the enclosure had failed so I tested it with the HFS plus J the Mac formatted ones and I popped some discs out of one of those enclosures and put them in another enclosure and I could read it just fine I could read a single disc I could read both discs so you know these work uh the way they're supposed to uh if if it fails you can get the data back if a disc you know if one disc dies you can take the other one out read it some if the enclosure dies you can put it in another enclosure so everything in terms of data protection is working but there's an issue with xat so if you have one of these mybook Duos which I still do recommend I actually really like them because believe it or not buying it in this setup uh with the enclosure with the two drives is actually cheaper than buying uh these drives individually and kind of building your own so you can save a little bit of money if you buy one of these there are other ways there are you know better drives better enclosures that offer more features but for my purposes I I actually really like these they're really affordable and you can get a ton of storage space out of it you know like I said up to 8 terabytes currently and I really like the fact that there is you know power and USB on the back for mounting the The Raid but then it also has two extra USB ports so you can uh you know put more hard drives through there you can power other devices whatever you need so you don't lose ports uh you actually gain an extra Port by using one of these so uh I do still recommend them but if you're going to use one of these specifically on a Mac I can attest to What It's Like on Windows um I assume it's a little bit better but if you're going to use one of these on a Mac do not do X fat even though theoretically it should be compatible and there shouldn't be any problems hopefully the story has given you Insight that you may actually run into problems and unfortunately I never figured out a way to get the data back off the hard drive so if I had done this you know X fat format on a client drive and lost 8 terabytes of footage like oh my gosh like you know how like I I I don't even think I have to explain how how bad of a situation that would be because it would be really really bad thankfully it was just a personal thing but that's why it's really important that you do personal work along with professional client stuff because there are so many things that I've learned shooting uh personal projects both from a filming uh production standpoint and a post-production standpoint you learn stuff like this you can test things out personally before you commit to a professional project doing the same route and you can kind of troubleshoot things before it becomes a problem for a client it's always better to have the problem yourself than have to explain the problem to a client because then you don't look like a professional you look like an amateur and you definitely don't want that so if you are going to do one of these with a Mac don't use x fat I would say stay away from it even though it's an option in the software don't use it I I don't think a lot of people do I think most people who are on Mac use the Mac format I mean that's what I have been doing for years and that's why I assume this isn't a real common problem but if you have that idea like I did of like oh X fat is cross compatible stay away don't do it and it you know what it may even apply to other raid enclosures on Mac I don't I I would be very curious if other people have formatted raid ones uh with the xat format and use them successfully on a Mac without issue if that is the case please leave a comment correct me if I'm wrong on any of this information basically I'm going off of what I figured out and what I deduced on my own because the internet was not really that helpful in this regard and tech support and all the people I've reached to have not been able to help me or educate me and I'm not you know a systems uh engineer I'm I'm not familiar with the internal architecture of hard drive and all the different formats I'm a a pro user but still more casual so these are are my kind of assumptions and my deductions based on the experience that I've gone through but like I said this could apply to other raid one enclosures you know so it might not even be specific to the my book Duos it it could just be a problem with raid one and X fat on Mac in general but uh I I do need to do more research but I wanted to tip you guys off to this in case you do end up buying one of these since I've recommended them in the past cuz I do really like them I didn't want you to buy one thinking they were great format as X fat and then go where's all my footage you you screwed me make sure that you're really familiar with the system uh that's in place do test after test after test cuz it's really important you know even if you have a raid set up like this you know this could get stolen it could blow up there could be a so you should also think about having another one offsite at another location as a proper backup because a raid one yes it's a mirrored version but if you know something gets corrupted on one drive that can transfer to the other if a file gets deleted on one drive it'll get deleted on the other they're just a mirror of one another in a raid one setup so it's not the the safest uh way to do it you know they're they're it's it's much better to have uh one of one of these That's rated in case one of the discs fail but then also something offsite as another full clone backup as well in case something were to happen to this drive it gets more expensive the more safety barriers you put in place so obviously you have to figure out what's going to work with your budget and what your needs are for the project but really when it comes to data protection you want to be as safe as possible so that's why I thought I'd make this video tipping you off to it hopefully that all made sense if you have any questions you can always ask me a comment and if I messed anything up please correct me in the comments below and I can either uh you know fix it in the description or make a follow-up video if I have to but I think everything I've shared has been accurate to the best of my knowledge uh it is not been a fun process trying to get this fixed and you know I I actually didn't get it fixed but at least I figured out what the problem was and that's for me the most important part so I know what caused it so it doesn't happen again still recommend these uh definitely a good raid setup if you're looking for something like that

Channel: _tographer

Views: 95,736

Keywords: behind the scenes, stronzv, dslr video production, wd my book duo, raid1, my book duo raid, western digital, raid1 failure, my book duo raid failure, wd drive utilities, fix raid1, raid1 exfat, exfat raid, exfat raid problems, raid1 problems, my book duo not working, my book duo enclosure, raid enclosure, raid encryption, raid not mounting, raid invisible, raid recovery, drive recovery, disk utility

Id: 8srbPb_5U3k

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2017