I’m in a bit of a pickle. Without fully understanding how the WD Mybook Duo works in a mirrored configuration, I made the bad assumption that when my disks were full I could remove them, archive one (in storage) and then erase and re-purpose the other. Bad decision it turns out! I now have a pile of 8 external HDs with years of raw photos and video that I cannot access.
Can anyone at WD please help me problem solve this. Is there a way to access all of this data, now on single drives?
I do have all of the data backed up in another location, but this was to be my off-site, redundantb solution.
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.
Peter
“We” are not WD. This is the community site not WD Support. If you need WD Support, you should contact them directly.
As for your drives, it’s unclear exactly what you did. Mirror means both drives have the exact same content. If one fails, the other is still active and your content is safe, just no longer redundant. The process would be to replace the bad drive, then wait until the unit rebuilds the mirror. You can also increase the storage capacity but you must follow the procedure in the appropriate owner’s manual. It’s possible, you may be able to remove the current drives, install 1 “archived” drive and boot. However, this assumes there’s been no corruption of the drive.
Exactly how have you come to have 8 drives (seems like you’ve been doing this for a while)? How big are they? How did you “replace” them when they became full? Did you keep only the drives in “slot 1” or is it mixed? Are the “archived” drives installed in other enclosures?
While you may be able to use specialized disk recovery software (assuming the drives are still healthy), the easiest path may be just get new drives big enough to hold ALL of your data with room for growth, rebuild the Duo with the new drives and restore ALL of the data to it (while co-located with the other system). Then you can bring it off-site.
A consideration is once you’ve relocated it, how will you ensure they stay in sync?
Thank you Saudade. I had several MyBook Duos running and decided to upgrade to a Synology NAS. And yes, I have been doing this for quite some time. Nothing was corrupted. I simply thought that I could get rid of using the many separate WD MyBooks by removing the drives, storing one in another location, and then erasing 9repurposing) the second drive if ever needed.
I was curious about something so I took one of the archived drives and tried to access it. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be possible. I tried on a generic drive as well as on a MyBook Duo enclosure but no joy. Seems you have to have the exact same enclosure to make it work so I’d have to play roulette to find the right one. Not happening.
I am fine wrt the data since it is all on the Synology, however I was hoping I had created a physical backup that could be stored elsewhere. Apparently not the case.
I think the MB Duos are encrypted.
To avoid the roulette, examine the MBD PCB and record the markings on the major ICs. These will include YYWW or YWW date codes (Year / Week). You (or I) could then compare these against the manufacture dates on the HDD labels.