I have a NAS running Openmediavault it has 6 Physical drives installed (2 SATA 4 IDE) each drive synchronises to an external drive once a week as a backup so I have 2 copies of everything (what can go wrong)
unknown to me one of the drives screwed up and corrupted all the data then synced the corrupted data to the external backup drive leaving me with 2 copies of nothing and this was the most important drive I had because it contained video footage of my children and grand-daughter which I can never get back
I’ve since removed the offending drive and re-formatted it in gparted and it now seems to be ok so my question is can I ever trust this drive or is there any methods or utilities I can use to check or repair this drive properly
lastly can anyone suggest a better method to backup and safeguard against this disaster ever happening again ?
I have videos and photos of my grandchildren and have them backed up on usb sticks, but more important “in the cloud” as insurance.
I use dropbox for some Drive for others and also recently been using Flickr where you get 1 terra bite free and this week I’m looking to use Vimeo, so hopefully have all possibilities covered.
so even if the house burnt down I would still have these precious memories.
tough break with the lost videos. Feeling that one fella.
Yeah so am I
I use dropbox for some Drive for others and also recently been using Flickr where you get 1 terra bite free
Dropbox isn’t big enough unless I pay for extra storage, and I recently opened a flickr account and put all my photos there and was gonna copy the videos over as well, but never got round to it
What is the filesystem on the drives? Are they in a RAID configuration?
So are the drives configured as an LVM (a JBOD configuration)?
There is no special configuration, I don’t understand raid well enough to attempt to configure it that way, I didn’t feel there was any benefit with LVM and I don’t have a clue what JBOD means, each filesystem had it’s own partition on it’s own drive I suppose that’s the best way I can describe it
I am no expert in doing backups but here is my take on it.
My first instinct would have been to try to recover the files off the corrupted drive (as it is more than likely it was just a corrupted file system).
There is no defense against synchronizing backup with a corrupt source (unless you can catch it before the process begun)
The best way (IMHO) is to keep a rotating backup of weekly backups (a month worth). Obviously if you have gone past that period and did not notice the corruption then you will have a month worth of corrupted backups.
My first instinct would have been to try to recover the files off the corrupted drive (as it is more than likely it was just a corrupted file system).
That’s exactly what I tried to do I ran the recovery utility in gparted but I was getting weird error messages and nothing I tried would recover the data,
I would have sought help with it but I thought at that point I still had the data backed up on the external drive so I wasn’t too concerned so I wiped the drive and re-formatted it and now although the drive seems ok I have nothing to put on it
The ironic thing about this is that at the very beginning when I first realised there was a problem I disconnected the backup drive to protect the data until I got it sorted out not knowing that the data was already gone
In the search for my solution I came across this site and wondered if it might benefit you?
If the claims for the various bits and bobs are true, it might just get your info back? You might be able to d/l them to another of your drives rather than use a live cd - I can’t comment on that - but worth a try, don’t you think?
Whatever you do, don’t write anything else to that particular disk until you’ve given it a go!
Going forward, that’s not the best strategy. It won’t help your current situation, but for future reference, you should build some redundancy in there for a NAS. What are the sizes of all the drives?
I agree with Sezo though - rotating backups are the way forward. This is as simple as buying a second external drive, and physically rotating them. Or, if your external hard drive has a big capacity compared to the NAS, you might be able to do incremental backups, where new files are added into seperate archives, so the corruption would be isolated into smalled chunks (this wouldn’t protect against filesystem corruption, but ext4 is pretty stable…)
Personally I fear nothing short of a miracle will get me those files back but as you say “Worth a try” I would try witchcraft if I thought it could get them back for me
If there are files you value then it is worth the try.
I have used photorec in the past with varying success, though I would suggest to create an image of your drive (on a different HDD) first and then work on that.
If there are files you value then it is worth the try.
I have used photorec in the past with varying success, though I would suggest to create an image of your drive (on a different HDD) first and then work on that.
I’d move hell and high water if I thought there was even a slim chance to recovering these files , but i would need to get another drive big enough, the drive concerned is 1tb and contains copies of the contents of all the drives installed in the NAS
Is that the same drive which screwed up the data or it is the backup drive?
To have some hope for a successful recovery, then it must be done on the original (screwed up drive), specifically on the image of it.
To have some hope for a successful recovery, then it must be done on the original (screwed up drive), specifically on the image of it.
In that case it looks like I have no hope because I’ve since re-formatted that drive twice once with gparted and once with Openmediavault create filesystem utility
I know what you must be thinking and I only have myself to blame but I did that thinking I still had the contents backed up on the backup drive
Formatting the drive does not destroy the files, overwriting does.
So, if you have not written (too much) data to that drive then there is still a chance that you could recover some of the files.
Hey you could find yourself in trouble with the PC police for that remark (that is as in politically correct) you know who I mean they used to be called Nazis
Formatting the drive does not destroy the files, overwriting does.
So, if you have not written (too much) data to that drive then there is still a chance that you could recover some of the files. :D
I thought formatting wiped everything,
well the drive is 320gb and I’ve written 675mb to it, originally I think I had around 60gb of data
