7000 photos lost!

henleyryan · 11 Mar 2007 at 17:55

I have a server with four 250gb sata drives in a raid 0+1 array.
I always have problems with the SATA drives becomig unplugged from the system randomly, ( i think it is a crap connection and very insecure)
Had 14000 photos all over the place in various folders.
Moved them around and had 7 folders with all the pictures in.
Rebooted the server for something, can't remember why.
A raid popup came up saying that the mirror was broken and it needs to check itself.
After the check folders 1, 2 and 3 are still there but folders 4,5,6 and 7 have dissapeared.
I've ran a program called freeundelete 2.0 but this doesn't seem to be getting anywhere.

All help will be appreciated in this matter.
~Hennerz~

weescott · 11 Mar 2007 at 18:48

Use somethink like Getdataback NTFS. Add me to messenger and I'll help you if you wish.

iMacMart · 11 Mar 2007 at 19:15

Yeah that or "recover my files" or summit.......

Hope you get them back

MikeTimbers · 11 Mar 2007 at 19:25

Sorry to hear that and I don't have any help to offer but...

... to all those reading this thread, this is why RAID should not be trusted as the only location for irreplaceable information. Copy the data to removable storage such as DVD or tape or external disks.

mishima · 11 Mar 2007 at 19:34

MikeTimbers said:
Sorry to hear that and I don't have any help to offer but...

... to all those reading this thread, this is why RAID should not be trusted as the only location for irreplaceable information. Copy the data to removable storage such as DVD or tape or external disks.

Sorry to hear you are having problems, as above though I use DVD-RW to backup my data - easy to add to, fast, and reliable.

henleyryan · 11 Mar 2007 at 19:36

Yeah i second that, these photos had a lot of centimental value and i highly doubt i shall be able recover anything from this incident.

It's running GDB for NTFS as we speak, it's finding lots of stuff but i'm not sure if thats whats on the array or thats the deleted stuff from the array.

henleyryan · 11 Mar 2007 at 19:41

mishima said:
Sorry to hear you are having problems, as above though I use DVD-RW to backup my data - easy to add to, fast, and reliable.

Thank you for your sympathy. I'll definately be using more dvds in the futur for the uber importna stuff but i had a lot of films and music on there as well (400GB) so raid seemed a lot more appropriate at the time.

I don't think it is the fault of the raid, it's the fault of the sata connection it's no where near as secure as IDE used to be.

furnace · 11 Mar 2007 at 19:48

I know I should know this by now, but meh - I don't - so please inform me

RAID - are there two modes, one where you can set up multiple hard disks as one big hard disk (e.g. 2x500GB = 1TB), and another mode where you can set multiple hard disks to copy each other (e.g. 2x500GB drives with the same thing on both) - so you end up with a constant backup of your data?

If I'm right, which mode were you using, and how did you loose both drives if it was the second mode I mentioned?

If I'm wrong (which I think I am?!) please correct me

Surely if you have hard drives "copying each other" then you're not gonna loose the data if one of the drives fail..? Or am I missing something here?

mishima · 11 Mar 2007 at 20:15

henleyryan said:
Thank you for your sympathy. I'll definately be using more dvds in the futur for the uber importna stuff but i had a lot of films and music on there as well (400GB) so raid seemed a lot more appropriate at the time.

I don't think it is the fault of the raid, it's the fault of the sata connection it's no where near as secure as IDE used to be.

Around this time last summer my hard disk went bang (IBM Deskstar) ended up with the infamous 'click-of-death', because it happened so suddenly I lost everything on the drive - a lot of it I hadn't backed up which was stupid but you learn from mistakes. Friends that I heard from this naturally began backing up their data because of the reality that had hit me. I now do a backup every 2 or so weeks off my system.

skanky · 11 Mar 2007 at 20:16

henleyryan said:
Yeah i second that, these photos had a lot of centimental value and i highly doubt i shall be able recover anything from this incident.

if the photos are really that important and irrecoverable then try using a professional data recovery company?

weescott · 11 Mar 2007 at 21:17

IIRC you are talking £80 just for them to look at it! :eek:

skanky · 11 Mar 2007 at 22:38

if its the photos as the OP says, has certain centimental value, that it might be worth it?

korbk · 11 Mar 2007 at 22:42

Trouble is, as soon as you mention RAID the costs sky rocket. You'd be looking at at least a grand! Unless you go to one of the lesser known companies, but then you're taking a huge risk on losing something that is irreplacable.

bledd · 11 Mar 2007 at 22:43

try file scavenger 3

Greenlizard0 · 12 Mar 2007 at 00:12

MikeTimbers said:
Sorry to hear that and I don't have any help to offer but...

... to all those reading this thread, this is why RAID should not be trusted as the only location for irreplaceable information. Copy the data to removable storage such as DVD or tape or external disks.

Really gutted to read you lost your pictures, I hope that you can get them back.

I don't have that many photo's on my computer, several hundred at the most, but I do have a western digital external drive sitting by me for my back ups..

tsinc80697 · 12 Mar 2007 at 01:39

I recently had a 500GB WD drive go nuts on itself and it decided it was 1.1TB.

Ran about 6 programs for a whole week trying to get all my data back, i managed to get everything back except Image files and compress files, both of these were just corrupt.

I got a few images back, but hardly any from the past 2 years which include somethings that I really didn't want to lose.

AVIs and MP3s came back no problem, it was just 99% of image files, including photoshop files, and all my RARs that were lost, its so frustrating when it happens, still cant work out why my WD did it, as it works perfectly fine now and I am going to back everything up when i get some money

the-void · 12 Mar 2007 at 07:22

After reading this thread, I think it is time to compliment my bi-daily backups to a backup hard drive with a complete off site backup.

Attach an external HDD. Backup onto that. Anything with an sentimental value will also be backed up to DVDRAM discs (As they last longer than DVD-R) and also stored off site.

Has any else noticed a glut of HDD failures reported on these forums in the past few days. I have replied to at least 3 in the last week. This is the forth I know about.

henleyryan · 12 Mar 2007 at 08:33

furnace said:
Surely if you have hard drives "copying each other" then you're not gonna loose the data if one of the drives fail..? Or am I missing something here?

If you want to understand it properly then there is loads of stuff on t'internet, a good sticky about it on here too i think. But you do have a correct basic concept of it, i was using 0+1, which is 2X 250GB that have been striped to create a 500GB drive, this has then been mirrored on to another 2X 250GB for backup.

If one drive fails it would be fine, but the problem lies in the fact that the raid controller got confused because the drives were constantly disconnecting because of the crap sata connection, because of the confusion it has removed the said data from both of the drives.

EDIT: I have run GetDataBack for NTFS and it can't see a thing, all it has shown is all the stuff already on there.

bledd · 12 Mar 2007 at 09:57

bledd. said:
try file scavenger 3

works really well with raid

henleyryan · 12 Mar 2007 at 10:30

bledd. said:
works really well with raid

Thank you for the advice, i'll try it tonight.