Tale of Woe - 2 RAID-5 Crashes - And a Request for Advice on Disk Recovery

[FogartyFOTO]

Howdy. This is a short cautionary tale of hardware and data loss woe, and a reuquest for advice.

CAUTIONARY TALE OF WOE

I lost two (TWO!) 1TB RAID-5 arrays this week, each one served as a back up to the other.

While I was able to pull much data from the pair before total loss, and able to salvage much data from earlier archival DVDs and external drives I'd burned, I lost nearly all photographs from the entire year of 2005 .  

As you know, in order to lose data from a RAID-5 array, at least two of the 4 drives have to crash or become inaccessible. So I lost at least 4 of the 8 drives in these two RAID-5 arrays.    What are the odds?

While it's very cool to have real-time access to all of your data, RAID-5 is NOT an archiving nor a storage solution. Of course, Peter Krogh has already warned us of this in his book and elsewhere. My tale of woe is meant to support such warnings toward anyone reckless enough to entrust all of their data to RAID-5 arrays, as I have been, even if they are redundant RAID-5 arrays.

A LITTLE ABOUT MY SYSTEM

Both RAID arrays I lost are software-controlled (Windows Server 2003.) One of the failed arrays does not appear to have any physically damaged disks (no clanking or nasty noises.)

For that RAID array, I think the source of the problem was a bad motherboard, as I was getting all sorts of weird readings in the disk management console in the days leading up to the complete failure (like the appearance of phantom drives that weren't physically there) and I was getting data corruption (garbled .jpgs in some folders.)

This last point leads me to my 2nd request for your advice, below.

REQUESTS FOR ADVICE

In calling around to a few Data Recovery shops I found through Google, I've been quoted $10,000-$15,000   to recover the data striped across these 4 250GB SATA drives.

1. Does anyone know of a less expensive way to recover my data? Does anyone know of a reputable data recovery shop that can handle RAID5, and that can focus in on just the data I care about, not $pending time on the data I don't care about?

2. One of the failed arrays does not appear to have any physically damaged disks. Does anyone know if I should be able to move these four 250GB drives to a different motherboard and get Windows Server 2003 to recognize them as intact? I've already tried doing that, and the other Server wanted to initialize the disks. I wonder if Server 2003 can recognize a software RAID array from another Server, only if the 4 disks are in the proper order?

3. Do you think I should just store these failed RAID drives in a safe desposit box and wait for the recovery process to get cheaper, or for me to get richer?

Thank you for any advice you can give me. And thank you for suffering through my Cautionary Tale of Woe!  

Steve Fogarty

[jfernb]

Hi,

Sorry for your loss. Unfortunately, I can't help you much. As you've already learned the hard way, raid is not a backup solution. (I hope that's clear for anyone else reading this. Raid can be used to speed things up, to make smaller disks look like a large one and to help prevent downtime, but for backup it's best to use standard methods like digital tape, dvd:s, portable hard disks etc. And of course the backups should be tested (by verification and restore tests) and stored in a remote location.)


The one advice I can give you, having worked close to data recovery people in the past, is this: DO NOT TRY TO DO ANYTHING YOURSELF IF YOU WANT TO MAXIMIZE THE ODDS OF GETTING THE DATA BACK!


Sorry for shouting, but this is very important. Even trying to restart a computer after a hard disk failure can (and often will) have negative impact on that disk. Moving four raid:ed disks to another server and hope for the best, well, it might work but it might as well make it completely impossible to recover any data in the future.  I would do that only if a professional data recovery service (yes, they are expensive - try at least to find one with a "no fix no fee" policy) is not and will never be an option. Also, stay away from any software that promises it can get your data back, for the same reasons.


(My own routine is to take any crashed disk and store it in a pile until I get rich, or something. Even if I have backups I can never be 100% sure that there isn't some very important file on the disk that I forgot to backup. Also, I never bother to send crashed disks back for replacement. Partly because of this, partly because you often get back refurbished disks that I would never trust for anything important.)

[peterkrogh]

Steve,
Sorry to hear this: it actually makes me feel ill.
I think jfernb's advice is sound: wish there was something better to say.
Peter

[Mike777]

What a total bummer.

If it was me, I would draw a line under it and just store the drives, learn the lesson and go shooting. Unless of course you think the commercial value of your pics is more than 10-15k.

I lost a few hundred images last year and spent days trying to recover them until I realised that my best bet was to just forget them and go shoot some new stuff.

Mike

[AndrewC]

If you decide to pursue data recovery, I just came across this service:

https://www.seagatedatarecovery.com/index.aspx