My Cloud Home · My Book Live · Personal Cloud · BeeStation
The cloud appliances are the NAS units sold to people who did not want a NAS: WD's My Cloud Home and Home Duo, the older My Book Live, Seagate's Personal Cloud and Central, Synology's BeeStation. They hide the file system behind an app and a cloud login, and some of them hide it from a recovery bench too. The My Cloud Home stores every file under a content ID in an ext4 volume and keeps the real names and folders in a SQLite database; the My Book Live uses ext4 with a 64K block size that ordinary tools refuse; and all of them depend on services the maker can switch off, as WD's went offline for most of April 2023. A single-drive appliance is £300 + VAT and a Duo £500 + VAT upwards after the free look, fixed in writing.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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| What you see | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| App shows the unit offline | The maker's service, the unit, or the network | Check the status page; then the unit |
| Coded filenames on the drive | My Cloud Home content IDs | Database rebuilt; names restored |
| Drive will not mount on a PC (My Book Live) | 64K-block ext4 | Mounted from the image on the bench |
| Files vanished overnight, June 2021 | Remote factory reset | Old volume rebuilt around the reset |
| Red light after an update | System partition | Data volume imaged directly |
A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, and an engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins. The unit is examined on its own; each drive is assessed on our own equipment, never in a NAS that will try to rebuild. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
The box and the disks are two different jobs. The unit is tested separately, because a dead power supply, a failed board or a bricked boot flash leaves the drives untouched more often than not. Each drive is then read on the bench: the ones that answer at full speed, and the weak or failed ones in clean air where they need head work. On units that hold an encryption key or a layout of their own, the unit is part of the data and is kept with it.
The drive is imaged and the data volume mounted from the image. On a My Cloud Home the SQLite index is recovered and used to give every content-ID file its real name and folder; where the index is damaged, files come back sorted by type. On a My Book Live the old ext4 structures are rebuilt around whatever the reset wrote.
Order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point are read from the drives' own metadata and the array is reassembled in software: mdadm and LVM under SHR, X-RAID and QTS pools; a ZFS pool imported read-only; Drobo's BeyondRAID zones reconstructed. The file system, Btrfs, ext4, XFS or ZFS, is repaired on the virtual volume, and encrypted volumes are unlocked there with the key you supply. Never on the originals.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.
The unit would not start and the app showed nothing. The drive was imaged on the bench, the ext4 cloud volume mounted from the image, and the SQLite index recovered intact, so that every content-ID file came back under its own name in its own folder.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseCheck WD's status page first; in April 2023 the service was offline for weeks and nothing on the drives was touched. If the unit itself is dead, the drive is imaged and the database rebuilt.
Yes, if the SQLite index on the same drive is recovered, which it usually is. Without it, files come back sorted by type.
Usually most of it. The reset rewrote the file system structures, not the data. The less that was written to it since, the more comes back.
£300 + VAT for a single-drive appliance after the free look; a Duo is a two-drive set from £500 + VAT.
3–4 days at the bench for one drive.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the unit off and the drives in their bays.