Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!

Disaster - Major data loss

Sean McBreen's WebLog — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:16:02 GMT

Well it's clear I celebrated too soon - I've lost at least 3 months of data, the entire (digital) life

re: Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!

Tiernan OToole — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:48:14 GMT

Hi Sean.

Dont you mean Raid 1? Raid 0 is striped with no backup, and raid 1 is mirrored.

--Tiernan

re: Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!

Stuart — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:56:31 GMT

I feel for you - I'm a new Dad too and I would be gutted if I lost my photos and videos. I've just recently put a backup plan into place and I keep two copies on seperate drives here and post all the nice/important photos online.

Raid 0 isn't fault tolerant so if you do get any data off the disk then it will be pure luck. Of course that depends on how Maxtor have implemented Raid 0 - a true Raid 0 array breaks up the files into fragments and 'sprays' then across the discs.

Sounds like you need a Windows Home Server - that's exactly what it's designed to do!

re: Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!

Rick H — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:28:59 GMT

You need a Windows Home Server... ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx )

Doesn't help with your current data loss, but would protect you in the future...

re: Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!

James B — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:03:03 GMT

Rules of Data Protection

1. Backup

2. Backup

3. Test Restore

So for 25 cents spend a little time burning some DVD's or DVD-DL.

Spend $20 a month for secure, fast backups or archiving, we provide both as do others.

re: Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!

szurgot — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:37:08 GMT

Sorry you lost your data. You should look into Microsoft's Windows Home Server. :) It does what you need, mirroring and data consistency, as well as sharing of media (although I'm having a weird problem with the RTM losing some of my MP3s)

re: Moments of terror - loosing a HDD and the key data... Well almost!

David French — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:34:26 GMT

...It's was a luckily escape - I had the 2x500Gb drives configures in a Raid 0 ...

Unfortunately, this does not provide any fault tolerance from disk failure just better performance. In your case it doubles the chance of loss of data because either disk failing destroys the array. The RAID 1 option available on the Maxtor unit is preferable for resilience.

I think this takes you into the forensic data recovery area and having to re-build the entire 2 disk array sector by sector (assuming that some forensic geek can read the sectors off the dead drive). I recommend that you do not write to the remaining drive of the array as you may increase the rebuild effort.