Catastrophic Data loss

[sickpuppy]

3Ware Escalade 8506
8x 250GB sata drives + 1 spare
1.75 -> 1.64 actual TB pending the realization that it really is all gone.

Due to a driver that caused my system to crash several times in a row almost immidiately after boot, my raid5 array was rebuilding.

To cut a long story short:
One drive seemed to fail, after replacing it, raid array was no longer recognized as a file system by windows. I think the problem was caused because of my HDD hotswap bay, i didnt pay attention to the order, i may have reversed 2 drives by accident when replacing. Note: ALWAYS number your drives with marker or stickers to match the ports on the Raid Array (as autodetect doesnt always seem to work)

48 hours later, after running an NTFS recovery tool, any files recovered were garbled, suggesting 2 drives were swapped. As a result i am running a Raid Reconstructor to determine the correct order of the drives, and i PRAY this will work....


Some of the stuff is backed up on DVD's, some on other HDD's but, i never could back up the entire 1.6 TB.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or ways to make me feel better ^^ i'd appreciate it.

[Madwand]

If it makes you feel better, I agree that backing up a multi-TB array as an individual doesn't have a good and affordable solution at present. HVD/etc. would be very nice, but aren't available; tape drives are very expensive or too small. Now if anyone here knows better than me, and can point to good affordable backup solutions for > 1 TB, I'd be grateful. I've asked the question elsewhere before and not gotten any answers.

The solution I have in the meanwhile is another server which runs a RAID array just as a backup of the primary storage. This one can be cheaper and simpler than your primary array. Of course you can build another multi-TB array. Of course it won't be dirt cheap. But it can be much cheaper and faster than a tape backup device with the same capacity, and useful for exactly such situations, and in addition some cases where you want to do some reconfiguration of the primary data -- without a full backup, some operations are too risky.

Sorry about your accidents; hope you get out of it still.

[sickpuppy]

The Raid recovery utility ran for about 5 hours and could not determine the proper sequence to create a valid array.

The NTFS recovery utility ran for about 24 hours and could not recover a single valid file.

On the bright side:
1) I have a few hundred gigs backed up on DVD's

2) A friend of mine works somewhere that uses these utilities, and I was able to get them within the hour of my crash. Nice to know who your friends are ^^

3) Now I suppose ill have the chance to do something drastic on the server, maybe a linux based solution, more stable, and force me to learn something new.

...

it doesnt eclipse the fact that i lost a 95% full 1.64TB array of data, but i honestly dont feel too bad at this point. I mean... at least I can still use the drives.... Oh yeah and the house didnt burn down...

[DougLite]

While I can't do anything to console you, or to help you recover the data, I can remember this thread to demonstrate to others how RAID does not protect data.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

[sickpuppy]

RAID5 protects data from HDD failure. Any software level corruption or deletions are not protected against.

I feel better about the whole incident, because I don't really miss it all that much. The Truly Crucial stuff was backed up, and the rest was... non critical but will be sorely missed. I'm not happy about the whole incident, but I am certainly not in tears either.