Suggestions for RAID recovery tools and methods.

[IngoVals]

So the day has come, the one everyone who made the mistake of buying a Seagate NAS should anticipate, that my NAS has gone FUBAR, my brother who had the same type also had his go SNAFU.

These were BlackArmor 400 and have been trouble, always. Really unreliable. Well I was starting to expect this and I have already bought a new one but alas it has not arrived before mine went kaput.

Mine is stuck in Seagate booting mode, while my brothers says the volume is degraded while all the drives are marked as fine.

So I was thinking of trying to recover what I can as I saw the http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/ tool but I guess that its not a full tool but rather a ploy to get you to buy their http://www.reclaime.com/ data recovery software (which seems to be needed after the first one has configured everything). Has anyone tried this? Are my conclusions correct or is this thing useful.

Anyone have any suggestion on how I might proceed. I would love to go free even if it means doing stuff myself but I also understand that I might have to pay, and then perhaps I could rescue my brothers drives as well.

 

[sfx2000]

Anandtech has a good article on the author exploring different means to recover data from a failed NAS RAID array... while the article is based on his experience with a Synology NAS, the basics are pretty much the same for any Linux based NAS...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8399/recovering-data-from-a-failed-synology-nas

Not to be preachy, but once you get things sorted - please consider backing it up to a external drive in the future.

 

[IngoVals]

Not to be preachy, but once you get things sorted - please consider backing it up to a external drive in the future.

Considering that I was almost expecting it to fail I think you are very right to be preachy, I'm thinking about getting a external drive to have some place to recover this data to, and serve as a backup to the new NAS I'm getting (Synology 415play I think its called). Any suggestions as to what kind of drive I should get, should it be a network connectable for automatic backup (of most important files)?

 

[sfx2000]

3 to 5 TB External USB drives are fairly reasonable in cost these days - you'll likely need one to copy the data from the broken array during recovery in any event...

 

[joegreat]

I cannot help, but would like to add my 2 cents:
That kind of RAID issue is/was my greatest fear when I setup my home server (actually with 36 TB gross capacity)!

Therefor I use only single discs, which are formatted in default Linux format (currently EXT4) and I use Snapraid to build recovery information, plus "aufs" file system to bind disks into bigger units.
This approach ensure that I can read the disk outside of the RAID/server and add/remove disks on the fly!

Well, not a help for you but something to consider for the future...
Good luck with your recovery journey!

 

[stevech]

Never used RAID here.
Always 2 drives, each an independent volume, with file version hackup (Time Backup). And external 2TB 2.5 in. drive for backup of VIP folders. And a 64GB SD card in NAS for VVIP folders. And other.

the majority of use I make of the backups is when I (me) make a mistake and honk of a file or folder.

 

[htismaqe]

+1 on the "never used RAID" bandwagon.

I use a similar backup strategy to Steve.

 

[stevech]

What do the giant disk farms use for redundancy/backup? Just brute force offsite replication?
Like AWS, Google (ever seen their photos of data centers?)

 

[ColinTaylor]

What do the giant disk farms use for redundancy/backup? Just brute force offsite replication?
Like AWS, Google (ever seen their photos of data centers?)

Which do you mean, redundancy or backup? The two are completely different things.

 

[htismaqe]

What do the giant disk farms use for redundancy/backup? Just brute force offsite replication?
Like AWS, Google (ever seen their photos of data centers?)

I'm messing with you Steve. Yes, I've seen a data center like that. I've even managed a few.