Has anyone requested a macOS drive but received a Windows one?
It looks like UPS are just as useless as I thought, theyāve just delivered my drive (luckily Iād just got in) instead of tomorrow as arranged. 
At least Iāve got it thoughā¦
Edit 21/10/21 it does appear as though so of my data is there even though I will have to sort it out and work out what most of it isā¦
I have received my raw data back on a passport drive. Like many others stated in this post, I lost the true file names and folder structure. To me, without original file name and folder structure, the big part of raw data is useless. I am looking for effective way to sort the files out. That is why I have spent many hours reading this post. As I read, I used OneNote clipper to capture many posts I consider useful to my file sorting project in my OneNote Notebook.
I want to contribute something to this forum as well by uploading a folder structure image that show what recovered raw data on the passport drive looks like for the people who has not received their raw data yet, also for the people who has already received the raw data on the drive.
For the people who has already received their raw data, is your raw data folder
structure similar to mine?
For the people who found a better way to sort their files from raw data collection, please share your best practice.
For WD engineers, please also share your best approach to sort files from recovered raw data.
I received a 4Tb drive back yesterday and strangely it has two file structures, one containing raw data and the other that contained my original drive structure!
The downside is that the drive contains only 379Gb of data and my NAS contained 1.8Tb.
Some of the directories are empty, and those that contain data have a full stop and underscore at the beginning of each video and are unplayable. Iāve made copies and removed the full stop and underscore but still these cannot be played:
You can see a single video file that shows as an icon and is playable. This continues throughout all my video folders.
The email from our friend Zachary says āWe have shipped your recovered data back to you. Your original storage media will be returned to the manufacturer.ā. Iāve written to Western Digital to see if I can get MY NAS drive back with MY data on it so I can try to retrieve the data like some on here. Iām not holding out much hope, but then again what will WD do with all the drives they get back? Sell them as refurbished units? 
Fed up of the wait to get my data back, but now extremely disappointed that I have lost most of my family photos and videos with no prospect of being able to do it myself.
And Western Digital can shove their discount for a new NAS right where the sun doesnāt shine. Not that Iāve seen anything in this regardā¦
Thanks for sharing this. Havenāt sent mine in and am trying to recover as much as I can myself. Iāve tried most of the software mentioned here by others and I have to say, the results from doing it yourself seem to be as good as what WD is doing so not sure if I will eventually send the drive in or not.
Soā¦seems that Iāve missed out on the offer to send back my MyBookLive to WD and need to assess best approach to recover all the data that Iāve now lost.
Iāve mainly got photos and videos, so if anyone can recommend a Recovery Software they have used for this particular purpose, I would really appreciate.
I didnāt have a lot of videos, mostly photos but wasnāt overly concerned about those as I do have backups on my digital camera cards. I did find that R-studio and Wondershare Recoverit did a pretty good job. I wasnāt overly impressed with Ease-US for photos though.
Someone knows how to get a direct access to the files? Mine isnāt hacked. Used RAID1 and tried to get access with my ubunto OS, but it doesnt work. The problem is, when I try to backup my data from the MyBook, its so ā ā ā ā slow, that its gonna take a month or soemthing like this, really dont know the reason whyā¦ thanks!
I am in UK and eventually got my Passport drive a couple of weeks ago and have been sorting through the 400,000 or so files to recover the ones I need - I used the MBL as a back-up for my MacBook and also as a store for old photos. The good news (for me) was that I found most of my old photos on a USB drive so donāt need to search for those. I asked for the Passport to be formatted for Windows so that I could do all the recovery on an old Windows laptop (a bit slow but keeps it off my MacBook).
I think what folk need to take on board is the way the recovery process works which I understand is something like this: The software looks at each file and then compares the file structure with a known type, e.g. Word, and then allocates the recovered file to that program with a new file name. In my case that means I have a lot of Word documents, XL documents, JPEGs, etc along with strange file names I donāt know. Some JPEG files are also tagged with the camera name but I have a lot which I scanned in from slides. Each file has a numerical file name, e.g 216537, starting at 000001.
So what I have done is separated the files by file type (as suggested earlier in the thread) and then saved each batch of file types on a hard drive sorted by size. I then discarded all the small files, e.g. XL files less than 10kb, as these were rubbish and worked my way down from the biggest (40Mb), opening each one and renaming any which I wanted to keep and deleting the rest. Along with the latest version of each file, I also got the auto-save versions - some of which are corrupted and canāt be opened. These can usually be identified as they are of an identical size to the latest file (which is usually the lowest numbered file) and I now delete these once I have opened one of them.
It is still a work in progress but I have found most of the files I want to keep.
Most of the JPEG files do have the original date on them but I donāt know how to sort them using that info - I am using the standard Microsoft file Explorer system.
The Passport drive has been kept intact just in case I need to go back to the source data for something I canāt find.
Hope this helps anyone still struggling - not very techy just grindingly slow!
PS - I found the old photos in a .trash folder on the drive - not sure if this was caused by the original MBL hack.
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I just got an email saying my drive has been recovered and is on itās way to me and the original drive is on itās way back to WD. I sent an email to WD inquiring now about getting a code for the trade in offer. Interestingly, on the web page showing the trade-in offer details, this little tidbit is shown
The trade-in discount must be used before October 31, 2021. No extensions will be given
Iām not sure how I can use something that hasnāt been given to me yet, so I guess weāll see how this goes.
So my drive arrived the day after I got the tracking #, that was fast. I used the drive for photo storage so thatās what 99% of the files were in raw, dng, nef and jpg format. The files are arranged a few different ways. There is a folder named Raw Recovery and another named Metadata. Most everything in the Metadata folder are files that I have no idea what they are. The Raw Recovery folder is separated in folders according to file types. Interestingly though, in a folder named Photos there are folders that separate photos by camera brand, then camera model. The photo files appear to mostly be named by date and then some type of sequence. This should help sorting things out a little. All in all, there are just under 488,000 files on the drive. Some folks have found some software that can sort by exif info, that may help a bit further. I still have a view of my old folder structure in my Lightroom catalog. Hopefully that can help recreate what I had. Looks like Iāll have a bit of work ahead of me.
Its interesting because I got my passport drive back, but never in all my conversations with WD have they mentioned that discount codeā¦
I was told early on that the discount code will be issued once they receive the original drive back from recovery.
I have had mine back for about 3 weeks now and 0 contact from WD. They also wont let me add a comment to my support ticket. Its stuck on āAmswered - awaiting replyā but wont let me reply.
So I copied the files from the passport drive to a new 4tb drive. All in all it copied some 650,000 files over. I didnāt have that many files on the original drive, I thought I had around 100,000 photos. Iām guessing since it was a Duo set up in Raid 1 that the recovery found all of the file and the duplicates on the mirrored drive as well? The math still doesnāt add up. Is there going to be deleted files in there as well? Anyone have some insight?
I plan on using one of the options in this post to sort them out
Just received a couple of emails from WD, one providing the 40% voucher I was promised, and a surprising one in response to my request to get my old hard drives back:
I apologize for the delayed response. Based on your concern, I would like to inform you that as per the data recovery offers no My Book Live device of any internal drive was to be returned to the customer. However, as you have mentioned that you yourself want to try to recover more data from the device, so you can reach out to the data recovery vendor Secure Data to arrange to receive your device back if still possible as it might be possible that your device has been already disposed off.
Once you have performed the data recovery attempt yourself the device needs to be properly disposed off.
This is after Zachery said they had sent the old drives back to WD! Iāve emailed our friend Zachery back but do not hold much hope. If these drives are just being destroyed I see no reason why they wouldnāt send them back along with the new HD containing the ārestoredā data.
Iāll let you know what Zach saysā¦ 
Ok, I made an suprising find. On the recovery drive they sent me there were 2 folders. One named Raw Files and the other named Metadata. The raw files folder appears to contain all of my photos, all randomly named but sorted by camera. The metadata folder contained a bunch of folders randomly named with randomly named subfolders. I got to digging around in there and low and behold, one of the randomly named folders appears to contain the entire contents of my drive, folder structure completely intact and all photos with original names. I couldnāt believe it when I saw it. I still have to go through more thoroughly to make sure. If so I think I can direct Lightroom to the new drive and it will find and rematch everything to the catalogue. Fingers crossed but this could be a dream come true.
After sorting through everything, it looks like most of my dream did come through. Out of approximately 100,000 photos, all but around 5500 where kept intact in the original folder structure with original names. Thankfully since I had the drive catalogued in Lightroom I was able to redirect Lightroom to the new folders and it recognized everything, and identified the photos that were missing. The good thing is, they arenāt really missing, they just arenāt in the original location. They will be in the raw recovery folder which Iām sorting by date using the photo move software. These will be a little more work to restore since Lightroom doesnāt recognize them with the random file names. Iāll see how the sorting process goes and if thereās an easy way to restore the names. It will depend on how much exif info is intact. Luckily, my Lightroom catalog has the original names as a reference.
Thatās great news. Was it just photos that you had on the drive and were hoping to recover or other documents, music, etc? Iāve had good success recovering my photos with the free software but not as good trying to recover documents, presentations and so forth and particularly not with original file names and folder structure. Still debating if I should send my drive in to WD or keep trying on my own.
