five years ago, today (i wrote about it when i discovered what had happened, which would have been tomorrow), my 2TB Western Digital MyCloud drive was cracked, along with tens of thousands of others, all over the world, by an anonymous, malicious skript-kiddie, and was reformatted, wiping out two terabytes of music, including a lot of my original music, several years worth of irreplaceable business records, irreplaceable original artwork, and other miscellanea.

thanks to timing and my immediate REMOVAL of the drive from anything that might further damage the files, i was able to recover 743.3GB of data, of which approximately half is unreadable, and approximately half of the remainder is random bits of text or pictures, but with no information about what they are or where they go, they are, essentially, useless. i haven’t looked at any of the remaining data for a long time, because it is too depressing… but i still have it, which is also depressing. another really depressing aspect of this is that Western Digital KNEW that this was going to happen, having discovered the exploited bug in 2018, but because of the fact that the firmware hadn’t been updated since 2015, it was considered a “legacy device” and they didn’t bother to tell anyone about it. 😠🤬 AND their only response was to offer me a 40% off coupon for another Western Digital cloud drive. 😒

today i have recovered and/or replaced approximately 963.9GB of music, and i have actually recovered MORE of my original music than i had previously, thanks to a couple of friends… although i don’t have ANY of the source tracks or information about the individual tracks other than what other people had recorded. i recovered a lot of business records and some artwork, including the .eps file for the panchamukhi ganesha that is currently on the front of my car.

and my new cloud drive is a 12TB QNAP (it has western digital drives, but that’s because i didn’t find out about them until it was too late), which is a RAID-1 device that is backed up in three separate locations on a daily basis.