WD My Cloud Factory Restore - Erasure Algorithm

swyld · June 17, 2018

Hey there guys,

I have a WD my cloud, which is several years old, and use as more of a convenience drive at this point. I did previously keep sensitive financial and work related information on this, however. On the My Cloud UI, it says that the "data is overwritten", but I cannot find a reference to which data erasure algorithm is used. As such, I was wondering if anyone here knew. In addition, I have several file/free space secure erasure programs, but none of them work on a NAS. So, does anyone know of one that will work for this?

I'm sure I'll probably get beat up for this, but, because its relevant... I do use a mac.

Thanks!

Windows7ge · June 17, 2018

I don't know about the algorithm but if you fill the drive all the way up with random 0's & 1's it'd reach a point where trying to get data off it wouldn't be worth it.

Are you planning to just scrap it or give it to someone?

swyld · June 17, 2018

2 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I don't know about the algorithm but if you fill the drive all the way up with random 0's & 1's it'd reach a point where trying to get data off it wouldn't be worth it.

Are you planning to just scrap it or give it to someone?

I am actually planning to donate it, so I will not know is the device falls into questionable hands. If the drive were smaller, I would just fill it with data over and over again, but it is 4TB, and this would take weeks.

Windows7ge · June 17, 2018

8 minutes ago, swyld said:

I am actually planning to donate it, so I will not know is the device falls into questionable hands. If the drive were smaller, I would just fill it with data over and over again, but it is 4TB, and this would take weeks.

If you wipe the drive, remove the partition, then create a new encrypted volume, and delete that then to my understanding even if someone tried to read any trace data off the drive all they would see is encrypted jargon.

If you popped the drive out of the enclosure and put it in a tower you could overwrite the whole disk overnight. Terminal should support dd which is a command line tool that could be used to completely overwrite a disk with 0's or random data. You could even write a script to overwrite the disk multiple times at which point recovery of anything isn't worth attempting. Any data left would be too corrupted to see anything.