WD My Passport 4TB Portable Hard Drive for Mac - Blue

All of my files are gone. I'm talking wedding photos, newborn photos, first birthdays, everything. This is inexcusable. I am at complete loss of words. To put your faith in a company with something so priceless, and the only option is: "a replacement device". The native utility app did not fix the problem nor identify the issue. I want them to pay for the files to be recovered. I will continue to post this unless there is some tangible resolution in sight. Contact me.

I'm 72 yrs old and a still-active newsstand magazine publisher, freelance web designer, and pro photographer and videographer. Trust this: In terms of computers and drives, I've seen and been through it all. I've been using external drives large and portable since the late 1980s, my first being SeatGate, then La iCe (the worst0, and many others. I cannot tell you how angry I was when I lost hundreds of precious family photos that can NEVER be replaced on that SeaGate. I swore I'd never use them again, and I haven't, or those 8 La Cie's I got from the Apple Store (still sitting in a back room for the last 30 years, awaiting the day I can get to them and have the data and photos recovered, if possible). I learned one thing critical to all drives: Back Up, Back Up, ... MoreI'm 72 yrs old and a still-active newsstand magazine publisher, freelance web designer, and pro photographer and videographer. Trust this: In terms of computers and drives, I've seen and been through it all. I've been using external drives large and portable since the late 1980s, my first being SeatGate, then La iCe (the worst0, and many others. I cannot tell you how angry I was when I lost hundreds of precious family photos that can NEVER be replaced on that SeaGate. I swore I'd never use them again, and I haven't, or those 8 La Cie's I got from the Apple Store (still sitting in a back room for the last 30 years, awaiting the day I can get to them and have the data and photos recovered, if possible). I learned one thing critical to all drives: Back Up, Back Up, Back Up. There is no workaround to that. Here's what you may not know and sellers sure as heck don't tell you: Expect your drive (any drive) to last 2-3 yrs, if you're lucky. Maybe 4. Next, if it is, say, a 1-TB drive, if you load it with over 70-75%, it can cause your drive to malfunction at the loss of all your data. And this may not occur immediately. To avoid total loss of your data, ALWAYS buy 2 identical drives so you have everything backed up as I do, especially my precious family photos. Here's what I did 6 years ago when I started with Western Digital. Every week (or right then and there) I would load my latest information and data onto my newly purchased drives (Drive A) and back it all up onto the second drive (Drive B). Every 6 months I would buy 2 new drives (C & D) and put personal and family photos from drives A and B onto the new drives (C & D). Note: I keep all business data and projects on separate drives. To accommodate the growing size of my data/photos, I increase the size of my drives as I need them. With WD, I've gone from their 1TB to now their 5TB portable drives (BTW, the "...for Mac" models are no different, no matter what they tell you, than the significantly cheaper ones used for PCs, you just have to reformat them which is easily done) to store my personal stuff. I also back up ALL this unto two large (18 TB) G-Force desktop drives. So, the lesson here is that ALL drives fail, usually much sooner than later with typically no more than a few years of longevity. Whether a month old or 5 years old, they can go out on you for any number of reasons, including bumping or dropping them or smacking them down on your table unless they are SSDs, but even they can die on you too. If you're backed up to another drive, you're good. If you haven't done that, you're....well, you know. They can also die on you for no apparent reason at all even if you've handle and treated them like a newborn baby. And remember, you can be working on a report, term paper or thesis, website, editing photos, whatever, and have backed up two days earlier. Although you'll be safe with all that back-up date on the second drive, you'll have lost all the stuff you've been working on for the last 2 days that you hadn't backed up if your computer goes out! BACK UP every 30 minutes or so if you're working on very critical "ABSOLUTELY CAN'T LOSE THIS STUFF) data, photos, web projects, etc.). My 27-inch Mac Pro is sitting at a computer repair shop as I write this. The video card went out while I was working on a complex website design project and I hadn't backed up that day yet. Fortunately, the loss of the video card didn't cause the los of my work on the computer. But my work over the last few days is sitting in folders on that computers and I need to continue working. So, I'm taking a brand new Western Digital 5-TB portable drive over to them now to put all my folders sitting on my desktop onto that drive and I'll back up all that to a second drive and continue working but on my laptop. REMEMBER, always buy 2 drives, NOT one. And, to Western Digital's credit, since I started using their products 6 years ago, only a big external drive died on me. I have 16 (8 plus their back ups) of their portable drives and ALL of them still work, even the first two I purchased over 6 years ago. Forgive the length of my message but I hope it will help anyone buying external drives for the first time and remind others what you already know. Back Up, Back Up, Back Up. Western Digital cannot replace the data you lost (don't throw away those drives, have the data recovered by a trusted, professional data recovery service) but you can prevent losing your data and precious memories by BACKING UP your data and buying 2 new external drives every 6 months and transfer data from the old drives to the new ones and keep the olds ones (with their data) too.

I've been using this product for at least 20+ years and never had a problem. My current 2 passports were full so I purchased two new ones today. When I plugged into my USB port and opened Time Machine, I couldn't back up unless erasing what was on the disk, which is the software. I've just spent 3 hours on the phone being transferred and disconnected and waiting on line with Apple and then Best Buy. These came with no instructions and when I googled, it said they should plug in and go. I've had my last two passports for 7 years. Have your products gone downhill?