My Book Live devices (Hard Drive) (1 Viewer)

AccessBlaster

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Western Digital’s popular My Book Live storage devices allow people to store terabytes of data – photos, videos and documents – and access them both on a home network and across the web.
This is a bad concept for people who don't really think things through.
 

Isaac

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This is very interesting to me. I guess I can see how the product might be viewed as very convenient, but...

For true "backup" needs, I've always tended toward Cloud services. Part of the reason I shy away from all the appealing, cheap, hardware solutions is I just don't trust myself with them. To me, one of the main 'points' of a backup scheme is to mitigate the effects of my own behavior - computers I use coming and going, having split/disparate backed up files all over the place, losing things, destroying things, forgetting where I 'packed' things, leaving them out in the heat, etc. IMHO, the hardware-based backup approaches kind of just perpetuate the same risks inherent without mitigating much.
Now with the Cloud services....basically the worst case you are looking at is the possibility that the company your stuff is backed up with goes out of business or discontinues their service (usually a huge lead time, like 6 mo. notice), or starts requiring you to pay/pay more (which you can get your stuff off before then).

However, even for my cloud approach, this story is a good reminder to stop every once in a while and consider what are the weakest links in my chain. And mitigate them as much as possible. For me it's probably the possibility of losing account access. Inspires me to download and save some Google Authenticator codes right now...
 
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