I was fortunate enough to get my MBL off of my network, and was able to dump all of my important files (photos, etc). But now what? Will we ever be able to use our MBL on our own Lan without fear of some random attack or format? Can we ever have any confidence in a WD product again? Is this now essentially a paper weight? The lack of communication from WD is troubling.
Are there any thoughts on a good, Reliable replacement for the MBL? So far, I’m seeing a lot of NAS that don’t come with a drive, or are almost as much as a basic desktop. Curious to hear other’s thoughts or ideas.
What’s next for my MBL when it comes back from Ontrack? Running it through a band saw a few times and putting it in the trash. Never again will I buy anything from them. A simple email about a vulnerability 2 years ago would have gone far with many of us who lost years of data
Options for LAN-accessible storage, in order of least-to-most complexity.
Place your MBL behind a firewall with UPnP and port forwarding disabled. Use a port scanner to verify you did everything right. You can’t get hacked if they can’t access your equipment.
Install OpenWRT on your MBL.
Raspberry Pi 4 + USB-to-SATA adapter/enclosure + the hard drive from your MBL.
The security fiasco over the MBL has a clear path. Get a large USB disk and move files from the MBL to the USB disk. Once cleaned, removed the disks from the MBL and toss the rest of the unit. Desktop hard disk docks are low cost which can access a bare disk.
I dodged the hacker bullet & got my drive disconnected before losing any data.
For what’s next, I’m interested in option 2 (OpenWRT), if someone of very moderate computer/network talent can do it without having to wipe the data from the drive. If wiping the drive is required, I’d probably be better off buying a cheap NAS box or just copying the data to a USB drive & plugging it into my router.
What say you? Is there a relatively low-pain way to ‘convert’ the MBL to WRT?
A heads-up on the drive case issue; my 3TB mybook Live has a 3.5" drive; not 2.5". No idea on anyone else’s, but it’s worth doing at least a partial disassembly before ordering a drive case to be sure you order the right size case.
Pretty sure they’re all 3.5 HDDs some may be green and some may be red. Mine was red. I bought a synology diskless for 99 bucks. Put the old drive in it and back in business.
Like most others here I’m pretty much done with WD and for a while I was a beta tester. But now, I’m done.
I’ve been raising cane with WD about requiring me to send them them the old drive without offering a method to back it up 1st. Finally got fed up and ordered a Buffalo Linkstation 210. Next day the rep offered to send me the discount coupon in advance. Not sure if I’ll take him up on it or not; no faith in WD at all now. Based on the messages here on this forum, they could have given us patched firmware with almost no trouble to them at all, and saved all the hassle for those of us who didn’t lose their data.
To install OpenWrt you need to format and repartition your drive.
So if you have data that you dont’want to lose you need to backup them elsewhere before installing OpenWRT.
We were out for some time and drive was disconnected, all my data is safe. My drive is connected to Netgare router, I ran few port scans from Internet to my IP but all Timed out… IP my ISP’s firewall IP have not taken dedicated IP for my network.
I use WD mobile app sometimes to access data when I am not home or previously I used use wd2go but stopped that long back.
Am I safe to keep my drive on?
