I had the My Book Studio II 4TB in RAID 1, connected through FireWire 800 to MacBook Pro working quite well since May. I had on it over 1.3TB of extremely important media and software backups files (RAID 1 setup was to protect this data). Yesterday morning after starting my mac I found that all data is gone from My Book Studio II - the volume name has reverted to the default one, the drive is empty, WD RAID manager reports all healthy with 0% space used. Looks like at the boot time the unit has re-initialized itself (the time stamps on all hidden system files is exactly the same as boot time), wiping out all. How this could happen?
Called tech support and was told that I need to use the data recovery software (or use the data recovery service) to try to get my data back, but they said nothing about fixing the cause of this catastrophic event. When asked about who will pay for data recovery I was told that it would be me - the unit is only 6 months old, still in warranty and obviously it was the WD hardware’s fault, not mine. When complaining I was told to call again on Monday and ask for Level 2 - tried several times today, just to be told each time to call later due to high volume calls to Level 2.
In the meantime tried to recover data myself.
First tried to use the Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery (as the only app able to recover original directory structure and file names), but the app kept quitting during initialization. Disconnected My Book Studio and started Stellar again - initiated with no issues. Connected back My Book Studio and Stellar crashed immediately. Tried same routine few times with no luck. So, I turned to my second app choice, Data Rescue 3.
Data Rescue 3 started working OK, but after about 20 minutes (0.03% into the progress) the WD RAID manager icon turned red and error message popped up telling me that my unit has a problem and to contact tech support for help. About half a minute after I clicked OK in the error message popup all returned to normal and Data Rescue restarted scanning for lost date - about half an hour later the same happened.
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How to get my data back? and
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Is it the controller problem inside My Book Studio II or something else?