# Mavericks Deleting Data on Some External Drives



## Lloyd (Oct 31, 2013)

For those considering updating to Mavericks or for those who have already updated, you may want to track the issue that many are facing with their Western Digital external drives and some other thunderbolt raid drives showing 0 data (ie loss of all data on external drive) after the Mavericks upgrade. The most prevalent problem appears to be related to the Western Digital mybook software. However, there also appears to be problems with some other external raid drives connected by thunderbolt. I have a Pegasus thunderbolt raid drive which in beta testing of Mavericks was found to be problematic, so I have yet to upgrade to Mavericks. However, the problem that the Pegasus drives are having may also be related to Western Digital software on the same machine. I have no idea.

I just wanted people with large photograph collections on remote hard drives to be aware of the issue and do some research before they upgrade to Mavericks. Also, multiple backups are always recommended. If you have already upgraded and are concerned about the issue, I would disconnect the drive until you have researched the issue. Apparently, the issue has not been immediate for some people. 

Here are a few links:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475136?start=0&tstart=0
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1664588&highlight=mavericks+raid
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1661354&highlight=mavericks+raid 
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1615649


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## sunnyVan (Oct 31, 2013)

I upgraded last week. My WD external hard drive is working ok. I guess I got lucky. LR looks different though, which bothers me somewhat.


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## Lloyd (Oct 31, 2013)

sunnyVan said:


> I upgraded last week. My WD external hard drive is working ok. I guess I got lucky. LR looks different though, which bothers me somewhat.



It seems that bare bones "brick" drives may not have these issues. However, the raid ones or the ones that rely on mybook software are the more problematic ones. I would definitely have an extra backup anyway.


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## wickidwombat (Nov 1, 2013)

wow thats nuts i hope my drobo is gonna be ok. it seems fine now i guess if it ws going to have a problem it would have had it already though. Do you know if its limited to WD only?


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Nov 1, 2013)

wickidwombat said:


> wow thats nuts i hope my drobo is gonna be ok. it seems fine now i guess if it ws going to have a problem it would have had it already though. Do you know if its limited to WD only?


I'd set it up so that it only writes files and does not delete them. I do that with my NAS so that accidentally deleting a file on my pc does not propagate to the NAS.

I'd think that would protect you if you were synchronizing with the NAS.

Apparently the issue is a delayed one, so I hope no one gets their images zapped..


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## fotoray (Nov 2, 2013)

I have a WD Passport HD and received the following email from them today:

Dear WD Registered Customer,

UPDATE: November 1st, 2013

As a valued WD customer we want to make you aware of new reports of Western Digital and other external HDD products experiencing data loss when updating to Apple's OS X Mavericks (10.9). WD is urgently investigating these reports and the possible connection to the WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager and WD SmartWare software applications. Until the issue is understood and the cause identified, WD strongly urges our customers to uninstall these software applications before updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9), or delay upgrading. If you have already upgraded to Mavericks, WD recommends that you remove these applications and restart your computer. If you have already upgraded to Mavericks and are experiencing difficulty in accessing your external hard drive, please do not save anything to the drive, disconnect the drive from your computer, and contact Western Digital Customer Service at http://support.wd.com/country/ for further assistance.

The WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager, and WD SmartWare software applications are not new and have been available from WD for many years. However, solely as a precaution WD has removed these applications from our website as we investigate this issue.

Sincerely,
Western Digital


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## Dick (Nov 2, 2013)

I just updated all my external back ups using OS X 10.9. Had I seen this before the process, I wouldn't have done it. I didn't notice any problems though....

That being said, Mavericks is really bad. The image preview is so slow that I have to think of another way to browse RAW files that are not in my Aperture library. Aperture 3.5 is also slow as hell and before I get back to PP, they really need to update the software to function again. These new software "upgrades" really ruined things.


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## jm (Nov 3, 2013)

*Warning! Apple Mavericks is corrupting external hard drives*

Warning! Apple Mavericks is corrupting external hard drives - wiping them clean and reformatting them with little warning. My 3TB Seagate music server is gone. My photography and video drive was starting to behave strangely, but i won't plug it back in. WD and Lacie drives seem most affected. There is currently no solution. No response from Apple. WD is the only one to currently recognise a problem.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23493143#23493143


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## jm (Nov 3, 2013)

includes Seagate drives - mine wiped clean, reformatted into 2 partitions - MyBook and EFI


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## nWmR12 (Nov 3, 2013)

I am glad I found this information although mine seem to be doing fine. Although this did happen to me with my 2tb WD green internal drive (have hackintosh) twice thought it might have just been a bad drive. I must say when I first loaded Mavericks it unmounted two of my WD hard drives and I thought I lost that data. I will definitely keep an eye on this now. 

Pertaining to how it doesn't render. I agree my old macbook pro when I installed Mavericks seemed to just crawl to a halt. In both LR and C1 rendering is much slower...hopefully an update can fix these issues.


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## canon1dxman (Nov 3, 2013)

Is this only with Thunderbolt connected drives?


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## Dick (Nov 3, 2013)

Just checked all my drives with my other Mac (OS X 10.5.8 or something like that) and everything seems to be there. I don't think that it makes sense to connect them to my Mavericks Mac before a cure to the issue is out.

Now I have a 100 photo pile, from which I'm planning to keep ~2 photos, waiting to be sorted, but it seems there is no way to do it using Mavericks. If I drag the files to Preview, they open up in 2 to 3 Preview apps randomly divided between them. On top of that Preview is slow and fails to show the photos properly. Aperture 3.5 doesn't work any better. All photos appear as the same one. The small thumbs show different photos, but when I open one and another and so on, they all appear as the same exact photo. Adjustments also blacken the whole photo. Closing Aperture & restarting it cures this for a short moment.

Solution --> use old Mac for sorting? --> ... Better not use external hard drives to move the files between the Macs!



canon1dxman said:


> Is this only with Thunderbolt connected drives?



Nope. Some have even reported internal drives being wiped clean.


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## TexPhoto (Nov 3, 2013)

It is never a good idea to upgrade on day 1, or anytime before about day 90. Mac / PC / Linux. If you do, have a full back up that is disconnected.I have 3 WD 3 TB raid drives that back-up the most important of my data. Once a week or so I rotate them between my office and home with the 3rd one going in a safe in a third location. 

Was there really anything in Mavericks worth risking your data so close to the release date?


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## neuroanatomist (Nov 3, 2013)

CanonLensGeek said:


> And for those saying that Aperture etc is running slowly, I found that Spotlight wanted to index in the background for hours on end after upgrading but that switching it off then on again several times cured it.



Anytime things seem slower than they should, check Activity Monitor - likely something is hogging your cores. Personally, I have iStat showing CPU activity in the menu bar, so I can notice that happening before things get slow or the fans kick to high speed.


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## Dick (Nov 4, 2013)

neuroanatomist said:


> CanonLensGeek said:
> 
> 
> > And for those saying that Aperture etc is running slowly, I found that Spotlight wanted to index in the background for hours on end after upgrading but that switching it off then on again several times cured it.
> ...



Aperture seems slow and it's the one using up everything there is. Preview does the same thing when browsing RAW photos.Close to 400% in processor usage... What ever that is supposed to mean.


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