back to article Furious MyCloud users descend on WD website as borkage continues

When a Western Digital president mass mails MyCloud users about the ongoing outage, you know it's a serious matter. Angry users generated 33 pages of complaints on WD’s community website after El Reg reported the MyCloud outage last week. Some users say that their devices are not visible while others complain of never-ending …

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  1. bigphil9009

    The cloud...

    It just works!

    Seriously though, I like the part about "your data is still available at your home or your office" - that's very generous of them, but it worries me that people may start to think of local access as being a feature of "The Cloud".

    1. Vince

      Re: The cloud...

      "but it worries me that people may start to think of having access at all as being a feature of "The Cloud".

      ...there, fixed that for you.

  2. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    WTF?

    What did they expect? It's the "cloud" and sometimes, sure as eggs is eggs, it's going to go down - same as storing it locally except that this time you get to blame someone else. So instead of the sysadmin getting a bollocking and working 24/7 to get the array back up again, your sysadmin is down the pub having a beer and "checking the remote access" ...

    You know, I could like this "Cloud" thing after all ...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: WTF?

      @What did they expect?

      They expected it to work; they expected it to be fixed within a week.

      Not unreasonable expectations, unless you know otherwise

  3. andreas koch
    Black Helicopters

    One of the NSA-trainees

    played with recursive permissions . . .

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "MyCloud"

    ... actually, "WD's Cloud". The only bit of it thats "yours" is the drive sitting on your desk at home. Everything else in between it and you as a remote user either belongs to and is controlled by Western Digital or is part of the wider internet over which neither party have any control over.

    Despite the lip service being paid of late, WD are not the most sympathetic company toward their customers once they've got your money. Their response to their own firmware update(*) bricking my drive was essentially - "go and buy another one".

    (* Which was supposed to fix a critical bug)

  5. Efros

    Doesn't surprise me, neither the borkage nor WDs ineptitude in fixing it. Their attitude to their customers hasn't changed either.

  6. MrXavia
    Holmes

    Cloud fails, no shit....

    Anything needs the cloud to work is worthless in the long run... NEST and other 'cloud' devices for the home are doomed to failure, company fails... then homes no longer have heating controls... great strategy....

    I love the idea of my home being internet connected, but the server HAS to be local...

    1. Fink-Nottle

      I was under the impression NEST simply provided username/password authentication to facilitate a secure remote connection to your home device. For that reason the NEST system hardly qualifies as cloud computing; it does not require access to remotely stored data in the cloud in order to function and if the company fails then a VNC server could provide remote access to the device. The worst that could happen is a loss of the software updates.

      .

    2. BristolBachelor Gold badge

      I also read that the NEST smoke alarm can be silanced by waving your arms at it (a selling point if you regularly burn toast). However Google has decided that it might mis-interpret movement and disable itself by accident, and therefore might not be working when you thought it was. So their solution? remotely disable all of them (WTF!?)

      I'm starting to think that I may not connect my automated home to the net after all.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Gee

    I put all my files on a computer I have no direct access to, owned by a company I have no control over, using infrastructure I hire from a faceless multinational. How could anything ever go wrong with that?

    Welcome to the cloud - computing like it was 1967 all over again.

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Gee

      I keep saying it seems like IT is going backwards.

    2. HangFire

      Re: Gee

      My understanding of WD's cloud is the files stay on your own computer, it's just their web infrastructure in the middle. So only mobile access died. The alternative is buying a Distributed DNS address.

      1. 's water music
        Joke

        Re: Gee

        My understanding of WD's cloud is the files stay on your own computer, it's just their web infrastructure in the middle. So only mobile access died. The alternative is buying a Distributed DNS address.

        Simples, you can get that bit for free from DynDNS. Wait, wat?

  8. Haku
    Coat

    My own personal cloud you say...

    I've always wanted to be a monkey with an irrepressible nature!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Smug Look Here

    I have a QNAP TS-269L dual drive NAS at home which has no need for an external website login to work. Just uploaded a 2 GB data file so I can work from home tomorrow.

    Kudos Robert Long 1. Could not have said it better myself.

  10. Captain DaFt

    Cloud storage? More like fog storage.

    "My data's out there somewhere, I just can't see it."

    "Just wait til the fog lifts, then it'll be a cloud again!"

  11. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Bad WD, bad.

    I have considerable sympathy for ordinary users.

    How are they to know any better when they have cloud remote servers thrust at them from all angles, and the meeja strangely silent on the problems.

    Business on the other hand...

  12. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    FAIL

    You know the trouble with clouds?

    They evaporate or drop their contents on us poor sods.

    They are not permanent.

    IMHO, if you put anything in the cloud the you can't afford to lose then you deserve every bit of badness that comes your way.

  13. Mitoo Bobsworth

    Nothing I ever purchased..

    ..from WD lasted well - looks like the trend continues.

  14. Aaron 10
    FAIL

    Layers of unnecessary shite. Run SSH/SFTP at home; use Filezilla or some other app to access it... done.

  15. Fan of Mr. Obvious

    Was it me...

    Sorry everyone, but I fear it was all my fault. My local install kept throwing a Semaphore Limit Exceeded when I would connect to my in-house SAN, so I had to uninstall. I really did not think that WD would have been running their entire remote access from my one instance, but the time frame is just too close to be a coincidence. I would restore the app, but I cannot access my remote backup. Sorry, but at least we are all in this together.

  16. HangFire

    Ignorance

    A lot of CLUELESS comments here. Even a cursory examination shows that the files live on the MyCloud HDD you purchased and keep at home- it's just the cozy web/mobile interface that went down. So Nothing is lost, or evaporated or "out there somewhere." It's still all at home.

    Disclaimer- I use OwnCloud, not MyCloud.

  17. thomas k.

    Just like the real thing

    Sometimes the sky's full of clouds and other times there's just a vast expanse of blue with nary a cloud in sight.

  18. heenow

    So this is kind of like "Back To My Mac" for everybody?

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    "Never again a WD product."

    Much better to switch to an alternative supplier which has not yet had this problem, and is therefore still complacent about it... ;)

  20. W.O.Frobozz

    The first mistake

    ...was trusting Western Digital.

    I've avoided them since 1995 due to their total lack of quality. Decades later, nothing has changed. My daughter's brand new laptop had a total HD failure after a month. I wasn't surprised to see "WD" on the drive when I opened it up.

  21. Lord Elpuss Silver badge
    FAIL

    I can thank WD...

    ...for the most important computing lesson of my life.

    Bought a MyBook 1TB to replace a number of HDDs floating around the place, and spent about a week moving all photos & videos from various laptops, an old desktop and a couple of external drives onto the MyBook. Then deleted them all off the various devices so we had one, easily manageable photo and video library.

    Then went on holiday for a week.

    Then came back, turned on the MyBook and it refused to start up. Head crash.

    Drive was a week old, lost all data. WD offered to replace the drive but wouldn't pay for data recovery (ON A WEEK OLD DRIVE). I didn't have the 1200 quid recovery would have cost, so had to explain to the wife that we'd lost everything.

    I decided on a point of principle to smash the drive into component atoms with an 8-pound hammer, then put the bits in a box and drop it off at WD head office in Leatherhead with a spicy letter attached. Enjoyed doing that immensely. Didn't get a response though.

  22. PM.

    So did they do one of the following things few months earlier :

    1. Outsource some team's work to save 50K $ per year ?

    2. Purge some staff based on their anti-gay-marriage donations and/or private comments ?

    If so, then I am not surprised.

  23. PM.

    For the record, if I were to buy a spinning harddrive today , that would certainly be a WD.

    Say whatever you want, but compared to Seagate , WD drives are .. what's the best word ... decent.

    Seagate is abysmal.

    Who else is left ? Toshiba, I guess.

    I don't know anything about Toshiba drives, since they are rare and pricier here .

    I must say I am happy with WD support too.

    They were helpful replacing my dead My Book Live unit for free and allowed me to restore the data myself without voiding warranty.

    For me it was rare example of pro-consumer and friendly treatment.

    Just for a little more balanced view ;-)

  24. spanner

    I confess to being an ignoramous but does this situation not expose the fundamental flaw in the concept of the cloud? I keep MY data in MY home on MY disks which are backed up in duplicate. I even have a hidden wifi backup RAID setup. To hand over your data to someone else with no guarantee that a) someone else isn't sifting through it and b) it is safe and c) that I can access whenever I want to is, in mt view crazy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "To hand over your data to someone else with no guarantee that a) someone else isn't sifting through it and b) it is safe and c) that I can access whenever I want to is, in mt view crazy."

      To comment on articles you haven't read is, in my view, also crazy. As multiple commenters have pointed out, the storage is local, and local access isn't affected. Only remote access via the WD web interface is broken, and that's presumably something you wouldn't usually have with a hidden wifi RAID backup either. It's called 'myCloud' as a marketing gimmick; nonetheless, YOUR data is still in YOUR home on YOUR disks.

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