Woah, watch out for WD Passport Drive sw
 

I'm going to share this with my gfy folks because I think we might be the type to buy these external handy-dandy drives to back things up and travel with. Buyer beware!

Ok, so before leaving for Mexico I picked up a WD Passport external hard drive. I thought it'd be handy to backup my work on in case the laptop (god forbid) has anything happen to it en route.

Before we jumped on the plane for home, we used the bundled WD Sync software to encrypt and back up all of the photos and such we made while in Mexico. Seems simple, yes? I created a profile and everything seemed to work just great. Then, to deter any nosey border fellows, I deleted the pics from my laptop.

Today I plugged in the passport to grab a few more non-Elli files from the laptop before porting everything to my desktop computer. Well, q'elle suprise! There's no more data?!

This is what I found after much surfing:
http://forum.hddguru.com/passport-dm...les-t9299.html

"If you are computer savvy...you should realize that the WDSync software is not backup software and is, in fact, just syncing software. So, if you delete something from your desktop it will delete it from the Passport as well, next time you sync. However, EVEN IF you are computer savvy, you probably wouldn't have guessed in a million years that DMailer would make "autosync" the default setting and that they wouldn't tell you ahead of time or prompt you in some way before it started deleting files. So, if you want to use WDSync to sync your data between your computer and your Passport, before you do anything else, SHUT OFF autosync and always manually sync. If you are not interested in syncing your data and just want to backup your data, skip the WDSync software all together. Don't use it. Just use the Passport like a jump drive and drag and drop your files to it."

So....

fuck you Western Digital. Fuck you very much.



LUCKILY I had a copy of everything saved to an encrypted drive on the laptop. VERY, VERY LUCKY.

wow, that is lucky

crazy that they wouldn't think of the potential for that to screw people up

I never use the software that comes with External HD's, I just use Explorer to copy/paste the old fashioned way. Much slower, true, but I at least know Explorer will work ;)
WG

you can use free and simple software called DSynchronize

Yeah, that's what I'm using it for now. I wish I had known that autosyncing function before, though. And I actually read the .pdf that came with the drive!

Fight the backup software that is not in sync with what you want it to do!

Can you recover the files with an undeleter?

always test sync software first with useless files

Even if I did, they're still encrypted with 128bit. Luckily I had the backups.

lamerz? :pimp
WD drives ROCK!
i have here 160gb and 250gb black little ones. never had an issue with em

The drive itself is awesome and lovely. I had a problem with the WD Sync software being not quite as described.

thanks for the tip, I use the same software.
good to know

Got one, but hardly ever use it but thanks for the heads up!

yes the WD software is shit but face it yer an idiot. Thats the bottom line.

this is your livilihood and you trust one single solitary copy of it? sorry but captain obvious says

yer a moron

Yep. Same here. I'm old school that way. Still use plain old notepad to do HTML pages too.

Ditto and I have 4 of those fuckers.

By the way Elli. where were you in Messyco? ( Mexico )