Lost My Images

photobanks

Last night the unthinkable happened as far as I am concerned. I have a RAID device running to back up all my images, so I have 2 copies so if anything happens to 1 drive I still have the other one. Fail safe I thought... until both drives failed within 10 minutes of each other!!!

How annoyed and angry am I!!

Thank god for SMUGMUG... I have high res files of all my photo's safely tucked away in Smugmug's capable hands to get me out of a hole. I only hope that data can be recovered from my failed hard drives so I can have my nice RAW files back!!

Michael
:cry :cry :cry

Art Scott

no DVD copies........I know I know never know when they might corrupt also...but the gold ones (MAM-A [Mitsui] do not corrupt like the standard ones at best buy and wally world......

Good luck on recovery...............

SloYerRoll

Wow, THat's crazy!
I had a simular situation happen to a friend once. It seems like a veritable titanic of data loss. Can't happen, but it does.
Glad SM was there to salvage your shots!

There's a great thread on data backup and the options here, since your faith in technology is (and should) be shook after this ordeal.

All the best,
-Jon

claudermilk

So your backups were on a RAID? That sucks. I use a RAID for my main data storage, then two separate, non-RAID drives for backups of each image. That means at least 4 drives must fail simultaneously for me to lose images--not impossible but highly unlikely.

cmason

Do not depend on hard drives that attach to a singular controller. controllers can corrupt data, and in the case of RAID, copy corrupt data to both drives. Rare? perhaps, but it has happened to me.

For this reason, I have a USB attached harddrive that copies all files from my primary drive on a SATA controller. This backup actually occurs every 24hrs, so that I do have a days notice if something goes wrong with the primary, and my risk is only one day's work. critical photos (some committent) get backed up to yet a different hard drive (IDE), until the two backups are in place or I feel safe.

dangin

i forego the RAID installations these days. it's cheaper and more reliable IMO to have a couple of NAS hard drives. you can map them locally as drives and use free programs to sync changes between them (i.e. syncback).

good luck with your recovery attempts! if you're a PPA member, i think there's a discount at drivesavers.com

as for DVD media, i recommend the premium verbatim discs. i gave up on the cheapy discs a long time ago.

Hindsight

photobanks wrote:

Last night the unthinkable happened as far as I am concerned. I have a RAID device running to back up all my images, so I have 2 copies so if anything happens to 1 drive I still have the other one. Fail safe I thought... until both drives failed within 10 minutes of each other!!!

How annoyed and angry am I!!

Thank god for SMUGMUG... I have high res files of all my photo's safely tucked away in Smugmug's capable hands to get me out of a hole. I only hope that data can be recovered from my failed hard drives so I can have my nice RAW files back!!

Michael
:cry :cry :cry

Mac or PC? What brand of drive. If it's a Mac (HFS+) I highly recommend disk warrior. Just mount one of the drives outside of the enclosure, namely off the RAID controller and run disk warrior on it. Chances are great your data will be recovered.

jdryan3

cmason wrote:

Do not depend on hard drives that attach to a singular controller. controllers can corrupt data, and in the case of RAID, copy corrupt data to both drives. Rare? perhaps, but it has happened to me.

And me too. About 6.5 years ago on a server that was running RAID on 4 disks. Classic 'failed right away' (about 2 months old). At least it only took replacing 2 drives before we realized that the hot swap wasn't bad ...