My Cloud: How I Recovered Deleted Files

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
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Hello All.

I recently was successful in recovering deleted files from the 4TB WDBCTL0040HWT-NESN My Cloud. I’m sharing with the community what I did in hopes that it helps others who find themselves in a similar situation.

Please note that there is NO guarantee that this will work for your specific situation. Also note that step 2 will void your warranty. Be advised that you have other options (such as professional data recovery services) you can pursue if you do not want to follow this procedure.

First off…a little history. The files accidentally deleted were family photos and videos that were taken over the holidays. The deletion was 100% the result of my screwup, so I had a high level of motivation to recover the data. Fortunately, I discovered my error quickly and took the following actions:

  1. Shutdown the My Cloud immediately. This will prevent other processes from writing information to disk, and will increase your odds for a successful recovery effort.

  2. Disassemble the My Cloud, and pull out the hard drive. (This step needs to be performed as we have to get the hard drive connected to another system to run our recovery tools).

I found the following video on YouTube to be helpful with disassembly. Checkout the comments underneath the video for additional helpful information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGLJi66vxnY

 3. Some will view this step as optional, but I believe it’s extremely important to clone the drive you just pulled out of the My Cloud and work with a secondary copy of your data. This ensures you have a fallback option in case something goes wrong during recovery. In my case, I used the following device to clone the My Cloud drive to another drive. There are many other options which will also work as well.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I03J1HM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

4. After you have successfully cloned your original My Cloud drive, set the original aside and use your cloned drive for the remaining steps.

  1. Connect the drive to your laptop/desktop via a powered USB enclosure. If you are using Windows, the OS should recognize the physical and logical drives (partitions). NOTE: You may get prompted to format unrecognized drive(s). DO NOT FORMAT.

  2. Next step…Do a search online for tools that recover data from ext2/ext3/ext4 drives. Again, there are many good options out there that will work for Windows or Linux. Read reviews and go with the one you think is best. I used the following on my Windows 7 system.

PhotoRec (Open Source) (Comes with TestDisk)
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

Raise Data Recovery (Paid)
http://www.ufsexplorer.com/rdr_ext23.php

  1. Step through the recovery process for the the tool(s) you selected on your drive. Be sure to define a recovery folder that isn’t on the drive you’re recovering. Also be aware that that depending on the size of drive, the scanning and recovery process could run for many hours. Plan accordingly.

Best of luck with your recovery efforts. Please reply back and let me know if you found this helpful!

2 Likes
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Wow that looks destructive.

I thought the My Cloud had a WD Red Drive, but that had a WD Green Drive.

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Hi Barb351!

You are right…getting the drive out was a pain, but once that was done, the data recovery portion went relatively smooth (just a bit time consuming). :smiley:

If anyone has a better method for opening the case (other than what’s shown in the YouTube video), would you please post? I’m sure it would help others.

Thanks!

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The video was not very helpful in opening the case - I broke the plastic camps - not a big deal, I really want to recover my deleted folder.

Once I removed the case, I found that there were metal pins on both sides of the hard drive that hold it in the case. Those pins look riveted in place. With the pins in place, the drive will not sit in my SATA docking station. Did yours have the same pins?

Also, after recovering your files, were you able to put the drive back together and still use it?

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R121567 wrote:

The video was not very helpful in opening the case - I broke the plastic camps - not a big deal, I really want to recover my deleted folder.

 

Once I removed the case, I found that there were metal pins on both sides of the hard drive that hold it in the case. Those pins look riveted in place. With the pins in place, the drive will not sit in my SATA docking station. Did yours have the same pins?

 

Also, after recovering your files, were you able to put the drive back together and still use it?

 

If you broke the plastic clamps, you most likely won’t get it to stay together. 

You guys need to note that even if you get it back together, and it looks okay, you have still voided your warranty.  Our RMA unit knows to look for case tampering, and will reject the drive if they find what they normally look for.  Remember, the OP did warn you.