Hi - Hope this helps others but I was able to recover most of my photos from the My Book Live using the Photo Recovery software from Stellar (link here) Photo Recovery Software to Recover Deleted Photos - Stellar Official Site
I have the MyBook Live 3Tb and was affected by this issue. After scouring the internet for data recovery solutions (as I have years of photos on the drive) and testing a few of them I found success with the solution from Stellar (The review from TechRadar also helped…). It managed to find and recover about 1Tb of photos and videos from the drive.
Steps I took:
- Couldn’t log into the drive via the WD app (failure) or via the browser (asked for owner password which was different to what it should have been)
- Reset the drive via the button at the back for about 10 secs
- Logged in via the browser (from memory the owner password is now blank) and saw that my shares were all gone along with the data. The bar at the bottom showed the drive with 90% free space
- Removed the harddrive from the MyBookLive casing after watching some videos on Youtube and put it into a USB enclosure.
- Used the Stellar Photo Recovery software demo which detected the drive as removable media
- Scanned the drive using the default settings (The quick scan version), this took about 12-13 hours in total.
Whilst it was scanning it was previewing some of my files and started building a file list so I could see it was working (see here:
- After the scan was completed I could see most of the files in the app and then acquired the software key so I was confident it was ’ try before you buy’
- You select a location to restore the files to and after a few hours its there again! Just make sure you select a different harddisk and don’t restore it to the MyBook Live drive to avoid corrupting it
- I now have about 1Tb of data to sift through which is all photos and videos. Note: so far I have found the original filenames are gone, some of the images are corrupt (only half of it loads), or are smaller (thumbnail sizes) but this is by far the exception and the majority is all good. Considering I thought everything was lost and now I have a lot of the stuff back this is a win in my book.
- I’ll let you know how I get on if anyone is further interested but besides removing the harddrive, this was super easy and non-technical; I even had tech support from Stella Helpdesk team when they realised it was in relation to this WD incident to advise which of their products would be effective, etc which were super helpful and courteous .
- I also tried their generic Data Recovery app when I saw that the photo recovery app could pick up the data but unfortunately after another 12 hour scan this didn’t work (am still hoping that I could recover my other files from the drive). However I have been advised that the Data Toolkit app that they have is the one I should have used as that supports Linux drives but I have yet to try this but hope it will work.
Hope this post helps other people in this unfortunate situation as I totally imagine there must be other people who had priceless wedding and anniversary photos on their drives too!
