Apple customers upgrading to OS X 10.9 Mavericks are complaining in droves about data loss on their Western Digital (WD) hard drives. WD has acknowledged the issue today in an email to its customers and is working to determine the root cause and a solution.
Western Digital’s Recommendations
At this point, WD recommends customers either hold off upgrading to Mavericks, or, if they have already upgraded, uninstall WD software.
To be clear, if you are fully backed up with Backblaze, you are safe.
You will be able to restore the data lost from your WD drive. If that happens to you, please immediately prepare a free download restore or order a USB hard drive or flash drive with your data. Before you prepare your restore, review the Backblaze file list for the WD drive you are restoring. If necessary, you can roll back time with Backblaze to before you installed Mavericks.
More Details About the Cause
While it is not completely clear from WD or Apple about the set of circumstances causing the data loss, WD at this point believes it is an issue between Mavericks and Western Digital’s WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager, and WD SmartWare software applications.
In reading through the threads on the WD forums and Apple forums, it seems this has happened primarily to users that have chosen to set up their drive as RAID 0 or RAID 1. The experience for the user is that the drive appears to reset, simply become called MyBook, and claim the partition is damaged with all data gone. However, this is not yet definitive and the recommendation of not upgrading or uninstalling the WD software is the best plan for the “safe rather than sorry” approach.
Consider sharing this with friends who plan to, or have, upgraded to Mavericks.
