After completing a full factory restore on a 2TB MyCloud, it still shows 1.74TB free of 1.78TB. I thought the full factory restore would have wiped out all files and done a low level reformatting of the drive. How can I make sure that none of the old data can be retrieved by a hacker?
From the My Cloud dashboard, when you click on the Capacity panel lower right arrow, where do you see that the space is being used? See page 44 of the manual for more information.
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/4779-705103.pdf#page=49
The dashboard shows 2TB of free space (it is a 2TB drive). However, Windows explorer shows “1.74TB free of 1.78TB”. Why is that? Please let me know if data is irretrieveably erased after a Full Factory Restore.
Thanks
Not an expert as I am still learning about this whole WDC Private / Personal Cloud Scheme.
The Full Restore does a low-level format so “ALL” Data will be securely erased and your My Cloud™ will be restore to factroy level configuration.
Part of your 2TB drive contains the linux embedded operating system that powers your My Cloud™ “locally” on your network behind your firewall.
How long did the restore take. My 3Tb unit has been “restoring” for 13 hours with no sign yet of finishing anytime soon.
About 30h for a 4TB so I’d guess more than 24h for a 3TB
started mine last night and I’m about 12 hours into it and currently reading 28% completed. I have the 3TB WD Cloud. did this low-level reformat based on another post " every problem was resolved" after doing this restore. We shall see.
I have been doing a full factory restore on a 4tb my cloud watching that little spinning wheel go around for 24 and 1/2 hours so far and am started to get a little nervous. What can it possibly be doing to a hard drive that would take it that long? The timer only goes to 24 hours so it started all over again when I passed that mark. I do not see any kind of a progress meter so I have no idea how much longer it will take or if it will ever end. At what point do you say there is something wrong. I’m afraid to cancel it for what that might cause. It will probably end the minute I hit the post button.
If you log in using a second browser, you should be able to see a percentage meter for a period of time.
Also, if you are restoring from an attached backup USB drive, it takes forever as well. I just finished spending 5 days going through the process of system restore followed by a safepoint restore and it said successful and rebooting, however, now it stays at initializing so I think my unit is bricked?
According to my own experience I can tell that the time that it takes to perform that low-level format is closely related to the amount of data that was on the drive at the time of hitting the restore button, obviously.
After a session of 8+ hours I’ve almost hit 70% on restoring my WD MyCloud 4TB, and it makes me think -after reading comments from other users- that I wouldn’t be at this point at this time if I had left all the data. I had barely over 50% occupied but I wiped out almost 25 to 30% of data before starting the restoration process.
Considering that some other users had gone under 30+ hours for finishing the process, I will have to assume that they backed up their data but left the copies on the drive.
I might be ahead of it, but I took a Screen Print from my Google Chrome and Firefox browsers at the same time to compare progression and elapsed time.
This I can give you as a reference.
I don’t know if this will be able to be seen but it says 96% at 13 hours + a few minutes.
I did some research and the process it’s kinda divided in two steps -erasing and formatting- (this information might not be 100% accurate, but it works for learning purposes), so, the less data you have on the drive, the less it will take for the first step to be finished. The second part will begin inmediately and it’s all about waiting for the disk to replace all the data with a bunch of zeros.
I apologise in advance for any mistakes in my writting -I’m not an native english speaker-.
