NAS died. get data from RAID0?

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 09:55

hi guys

our NAS died last night and unfortunately it died before the backup started.

to avoid me being scalped for losing all work that happend yesterday i need to try and recover as much data from the drives as possible.

can anyone suggest any decent (free) software?

the drives are 4x 250gb drives and were in RAID0 configuration.

i can see 1 drive in the storage section of admin/comp management. but i cannot access it. im now looking for free software to try and restore any data.

can a kind guru point me any decent free software that i can use to recover the data. many thanks!

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 09:59

btw - it seems that disk1 of the array is the dead one

unfortunately the majority of the data lost was in the accounts folder that would most likely have been on disk1 (maybe? i guess with fragmentation it could be anywhere?)

i must admit im not that genned up on RAID. this nas is fairly old (5 years) so i guess its time was up.

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 10:01

i am trying raid recovery for windows 1.42 at the moment. from runtime.org.

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 10:16

bah. cant get anything from those 2 drives. (2&3)

only machine with enough sata connections on is mine and im using that to restore mondays backup.

i take it i need to add all drives that were in the RAID array to see if we can restore anything? thought i might be able to get something with just 2.

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 10:17

GeX said:
The data will be strewn over the whole array, and your chance of recovering it in any usable form is slim.

Who thought that a 5 year old NAS running RAID0 was a good idea? Time to seriously review your backup and recovery policies!

agreed.

we are only a small company though so cash is tight for big new raid arrays. normally we get a nightly full backup though so it wouldnt have been much of an issue.

got a new spare RAID drive we can use (mirrored... raid5?) that will be much more efficient. pity i didnt use that before! doh. hindsight eh?

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 10:20

forgot to say. the drive was here before i started. raid0 wouldnt have been my choice. pretty pointless really but i guess necessary from when big HDDs werent available.

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 11:01

the old company folder so we needed to start again from scratch. so finances and my budget were none-existent.

drives used to last many years. i guess not so much these days. to be honest i thought this NAS was raid5 or something. raid0 is useless!

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 11:32

bah. drive 1 just wont show up. looks like im screwed. oh well. **** happens!

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 13:52

Combat squirrel said:
I have read this post in shock, so much lack of knowledge!

RAID 0 is STUPID, you will loose all your data, you CANNOT just access 1 or 2 drives, u need to put ALL the drives in an identical box that works............ the PC will see them as 'one drive - ONLY if all 4 are there, and using the same box...........

Epic face palm, use RAID 5 next time and this will sustain a single drive failure...

4 drive raid 0 for back up........ Iv heard it all now

im not a fully trained support/server techie. im a developer and project manager here but im in charge of the IT kit. i had suggested the kit be replaced in the past but that didnt go down well. i think they might listen next time

after having a big chat with accounts (who were the only people to lose anything, i work on another system) they have admitted they didnt do much yesterday so will just redo the work.

i am using a raid5 (mirrored raid anyway) now for the data. at least we have some contingency if 1 drive fails now. normally i do a backup every night but last night i had to leave early so it didnt get done.

actually there is software to access data with a missing drive. how much data that isnt corrupted is obviously questionable. i doubt much but its only the accounts stuff that is missing so it could well be only 50megs of data in sage and invoices. so that might have been on one of the other drives. unlikely i know.

i was pretty shocked that this NAS was all raid0. with it only being 5 years old and knowing there was 4 drives in there i guessed it was striped and mirrored? i know better now.

btw - be before i started here BT looked after their IT stuff, and it was BT that specified and setup the drive. i guess that should have set off some alarm bells! lol

realBabelfish · 14 Nov 2012 at 14:23

it was a 1TB NAS. pity that was made up of 4 crappy WD 250gb drives!

realBabelfish · 15 Nov 2012 at 09:25

to be honest ive used backup exec at the old place and its a horrible bit of s/w. i just backup using explorer over night.

all we do now is a nightly backup to my machine, then i backup to an external HDD in the day, that i take home in the evening. that way we normally have 3 sets of the same data and 1 set being offsite (in case of fire)

offsite backup is very OTT for a company where there are only 3 people in normally.

realBabelfish · 15 Nov 2012 at 09:27

JonJ678 said:
Wow. A day's labour is worth less than £40? That's a ridiculous way to operate. Fire your accountants

eh? where did £40 come from?

a nas with mirror and striped is around £600.

of course we make more than £40 a day :rolleyes:

realBabelfish · 15 Nov 2012 at 12:39

general files i guess. outlook OST files. office docs and our web apps (mysql etc)

they backup fine overnight so ive not see any real need to compress. compression can also have its own issues.

for me its literally copying 1 folder containing all our data on a nightly basis, then my dev environment and the live. all while not in use.

i have thought of robocopy but with win7 copying isnt the ballache it used to be.

realBabelfish · 15 Nov 2012 at 13:39

bledd. said:
?

compress, then copy

you have never had compressed files get corrupted? i have... as i say space isnt an issue so i dont see the point really

gareth. similar to what im using now. just not a NAS so shared off the server. we will see if its too slow but so far it seems fine.

realBabelfish · 15 Nov 2012 at 15:47

"Yet it appears there's no intention to avoid this happening in the future"

yet i have said a million times (exaggerated lol) than i am now using raid1/5 (cant remember which)... 2x 1tb drives raided up to provide 1tb with redundancy. should be fine.

we would have bought a new NAS as this buffalo thing was a pain in the arse anyway

one of the account ladies is an owner, so on a lot more than £10 a hour. luckily she had spent most of the day doing something else

as had the other one. lucky they werent busy!

anyway, cheers for the advice...