Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I pulled some old MyBook hard drives out of their cases and discovered they were unreadable via a standard SATA connection. They were older MyBooks designed for XP, so I thought it was just having trouble because they were using 4k sectors.

I found some information that claimed the older MyBooks would AES encrypt the data (even if you never setup a password) making the data totally inaccessible if the factory enclosure ever broke.

Fuck that shit. I pulled the drive back in and copied everything off, then formatted the disk from a real PC and threw that shit away. Today I always buy separate disks and enclosures that allow direct disk access.

View on HN

I bet they do the encryption like that so that you can quickly securely wipe them (just drop the encryption key) or easily add a password to the encryption later (just encrypt the encryption key by a password). It's too bad if it's completely unusable without the enclosure, but that general technique is one that I'm a huge fan of.

If the claim is true, would you rather someone pull it out and access your data? This is like breaking HSM. So why “fuck that shit”? I hear a lot of people worrying not enough encryption. So perhaps take this as a positive thing??? Having an extra layer of protection is never a bad idea.

Not everyone cares about encryption first. Personally, I’d rather have my entire HDD published on nytimes.com than lose the data on it.

> Personally, I’d rather have my entire HDD published on nytimes.com than lose the data on it.

If your data is that valuable, surely you were already taking backups/snapshots of it. Right?

What if this is the backup and the enclosure is damaged by some natural disaster but the disk is OK. I guess he should have thought of that possibility, but what if he didn't?

Then this is not really the backup though... I mean it is not a backup if you don't understand it completely.

Sure, I completely agree. It strikes me as unnecessary, however, for a manufacturer to deliberately add a counter-intuitive and indeed dangerous element to a device commonly used for backup. In particular, many home backup systems are not created by experts who might think of things like this.

Yes that'S the entire point of the discussion. Yet people still claim you should backup your backup. But where are you going to backup it to? To another encrypted drive where the enclosure might fail? No you're going to use an unencrypted HDD and be done with it. You can always add encryption on top of an unencrypted HDD.

It turns out that you very often need hard drives to make said backups.

Because I didn't ask for it! In fact, I already ran TrueCrypt and LUKS on those drives, so I was encrypting the data myself! But now, if any of the enclosures break (the controllers go bad), I have no way of recovering the data at all! That's a shitty design.

I have a broken MyBook case. I discovered this encryption when I tried to recover the data by connnecting it directly.

If abyobe knows a way to get the data out of it I'm interested to know.

https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools

https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools/blob/mast...

I have no idea if this will work for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com