I’m the admin on my cloud home, and I have 4 users. I encountered an issue on Local Access, showing internal error while enabling/disabling it. And the fix suggested for this by WD support is to perform a Clean Device Settings (CDS). After performing it, it did fix my issue with enabling local access for my account. But 1 user has lost all his data and it shows 0 KB used on his profile, although I think the data is still somewhere on the device. At first, I didn’t think the issue came from doing a CDS, but the issue of local access came back like 2 months later (yesterday), and I performed the CDS again, and boooom! another user lost his data again.
I tried creating a local access for that user, but there is an issue while i’m connecting with his account to enable the local access.
I’m out of solutions, and I don’t want to teardown the Device to get the Hard disk, cause it’s pain and I need to connect it on a Linux to access that EXT4 format …
I see you found the other thread with drKoh losing user data.
The key seems to be documented by WD support which I quoted in the other thread. If you are unable to log into the guest user’s WD account and enable local access for that user after CDS, you will not be able to recover guest user data. Ideally this should be done by the guest user him/her-self using whatever credential they used in the first place.
So try again using different browsers or incognito mode and see if you can log into that user’s WD account and enable local access for that user, otherwise you may not be able to recover user data easily.
I have made another test today by adding a new user and uploading some files on it. And I logged in using it to enable the local access for him, and since this user doesn’t have any issue yet it went straight to the page where I can enable the access for him without issue (picture attached). Where this option is no longer possible for the users that have the problem and lost their data.
Today WD support have reached out and asked me to perform another “Clear Device Settings” to be able to enable local access for the other users that lost their data before. And guess what, a third user lost his data again and the other 2 users still can’t access theirs.
After checking with WD support, and they were not able to help nor to understand where does the issue come from and their lack of responsiveness. I had no other choice but to tear down the unit and pull out the Hard drive.
I used a SATA Hard disk adapter to connect it to a Linux Ubuntu system, and as I suspected the data is still there and the OS couldn’t link it to the user anymore. I copied my lost data on another drive and connect back the drive with the cloud unit to reuse it, and never use “Clear device settings” again, cause that’s what causes the loss of data for random users.
Picture attached shows how the data is stored on the hard drive, after I shared the hard drive over network from the Linux using SMB server, to access it from a windows laptop.
Those folders that starts with “A…” are the users, and each user has data inside his folder.
Good work. I also noticed you had many more users than a ‘normal Home user’ would normally have. Personally I have never had more than one other user sharing the My Cloud Home.
May I suggest that with all the ‘Customers and Providers Projects’ and ‘PMO important files’ that you may have to backup, that you should consider using a business class NAS solution, rather than a ‘Home’ personal cloud storage.
Unfortunately ‘Clear Device Settings’ is what many My Cloud Home owners resort to because they could no longer access their private space by ‘local access’ due to ‘Internal Server Errors’ permission errors propagated by many apps and OS such as macOS.
Those folders that you saw are not backed up in my cloud home. They’re work folders and i’m using My cloud home for my personal data at home only. The users that you saw are my family members and 2 of them were just Test users after I encountered the issue. That means I only have 4 users + me.
I found another solution to the issue that doesn’t involve tearing down the device. But I wasn’t able to try it until I backed up my data from the disk. Now the solution for this is simple, I just deleted the user that lost his data and it says it will wipe his data but it didn’t since he can’t access it. And I gave him back the access, his data started to appear for him again . So for anyone who encountered this issue, just delete the user and give him back the access again.
. So for anyone who encountered this issue, just delete the user and give him back the access again.