As far as I can tell, WD's response is "too bad so sad you should have bought a newer product", so I don't think they offer affected people any sort of recovery gratis.

(I suspect this will bite them in the ass in the court of public opinion, but we'll see.)

Not sure what "factory reset" means, likely just deleting the MBR or something like that, the data is likely recoverable using consumer data recovery tools.

Yes, assuming the best case scenario it should be easy for us on HN. But for 99% of those customer they likely think all of their Data are gone.

( It will be worst if they start writing more data on the empty drive ... )

And I dont seems to read any site that offer basic advice as disconnection, power down and dont touch it for now. No knowing what to do is casing panic.

I did get an email from western digital saying turn it off. Granted it was 4 days after reports first went live about this but still. It’s something.

Not if encryption was enabled. Anyone know if these devices had full disk encryption?

I don’t recall seeing that option in the one I set up for my parents.