WD My Book Duo data forever lost if Drive Enclosure Dies!!

Question

This is a huge issue and needs to be addressed. I have spoken with a data recovery company, they have said that if your WD My Book Duo which has the "AES 256 Hardware encryption" feature, if the drive enclosure dies that your data will NOT be accessible even if your hard drives are in perfect working order. Your data may be fine and dandy on your hard drives but you can not access it. Even if you are able to find and purchase another exact WD My Book Duo and put the drives in that, it will NOT work. This is because the hardware encryption is ALWAYS used, even if you never attempt to use the WD Security app to enable "password" protection. This fact is NEVER made clear in ANY WD documentation anywhere! I hope Western Digital can provide a way in firmware updates to either DISABLE the always on hardware encryption, or to at least give us the ability to EXPORT/SAVE the encryption KEY that the device is using to encrypt the data, and provide for us a SOFTWARE utility which will enable us to use that KEY to read our hard drives even if the "Enclosure" stops working. Here is a similar related post that has not been responded to:http://community.wd.com/t5/External-Drives-for-PC/MY-Book-Duo-Hardware-Encryption/td-p/795949 It does not help that some well respected "REVIEW" sites have done really pathetic reviews of this product which are more like infomercials saying that they observed no performance drop with encryption enabled or disabled, and of course they did not because they did not know that "encryption" was/is ALWAYS on regardless of whether they enable "security password key" or not. They assumed like most reasonable users would that encryption is enabled only when a password/key is set not that its ALWAYS encrypted whether you enable password or not. Apparently the "password" you set has nothing to do with the encryption, it is not used for anything other than some firmware locking. This means in reality that Western Digital will be perfectly capable to decrypt ANY WD My Book and access your data even when YOU yourself will not be able to. Yes you can be locked out of your own data but the manufacturer and whoever else they may share their "Decryption KEY/s" with can access your data. So the whole thing about if you forget your password your data can't be accessed is a joke, its not true. Well its true that "YOU" can't access your data but they easily could. They just won't do it for you but if they needed/wanted they can easily bypass the firmware password and also decrypt the hardware encryption. In fact some data recovery firms can do that for you, apparently WD even officially "endorses" some of them, makes you wonder if there's any profit sharing. It seems that perhaps WD has shared certain "knowledge" with these firms that enables them to supposedly retrieve the "Encryption Key" from the WD My Book Duo and give you back access to your data for some BIG $$$. So again, I am asking for WD to please be upfront about these very IMPORTANT issues since there is no clear information anywhere, in fact all the documentation seems to imply that your data is only locked once you've set a password not all the time and with an Encryption Key that only WD has access to instead of us the users. There is a solution to all this as I have already mentioned, either allow through a firmware update the possibility to DISABLE the hardware encryption, and/or provide us a way to Export/Save the encryption pass/key so that we can access our data even if the WD My Book enclosure dies for any reason. Encryption is great and even better when Hardware accelerated for higher performance, but we should be the owners of the decryption Pass/Key for "our" data.

Answer 1

Hi, Thank you for the reply but I am definitely exactly one of those more Enterprise customers and my point is that your implementation is flawed and should be fixed because of course one of the reasons I bought the WD My Book Duo is because of encryption, but I want to own my encryption key and be able to decrypt my own data not have it hijacked. So I'm a little bit confused by your answer, is the official WD response that it acknowledges the worrysome problems I outlined but that there will be no plan to fix these issues? I am an IT consultant myself making recommendations for clients especially dealing with security. How can I recommend to "anyone" to use a product that seems to not care about preventing unnecessary data loss. It is not impossible nor even difficult for WD to fix this problem, to allow customers to access their own data off of their hard drives in case their "drive enclosure" develops problems or 'dies'. As I have already outlined, there are at least two ways or more that WD can fix this: 1. Allow enabling or disabling of the Encryption.And/OR2. Allow Exporting/Saving of the Encryption Key which we can then use with software to decrypt our hard drives in case of problems arising with our drive enclosure. Ideally the solution should include method #2 listed above so that we can enjoy the Encryption feature for which we purchased your products with assurance that we will NOT be locked out of our data for no good reason. I hope WD will consider taking a close look at this issue since it may at some point find itself with a lot of very angry customers when their WD My Book duos or other similar encrypted "drive enclosures" fail and people end up with perfectly functioning hard drives with data on them that they won't be able to access. Looking forward to a solution.