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Backup nightmare - Help!

S

Scott Brown

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Hi folks

I'm wondering if anyone can assist?

We use Voyager Q drive caddy's to connect hard drives to our Mac Pro via Firewire 800 for backing up client data. We usually keep 3 hard drive copies of all client media and then go out to LTO tape.

Tonight however we've had a nightmare with 2 out 3 of one clients drives having failed during a backup - the system crashed and when we re-booted our Mac didn't recognise the drives at all and asked us to re-initialize them :scared:

We have no LTO backup on this project and I'm now in a position where I only have 1 drive left and cannot risk losing this - what is the absolute safest way to back this up? I'm thinking that inserting the drive into one of the Mac Pro's internal drive slots would be much safer than connecting it externally.

Generally I'm finding external drives connected with FW800 is just not reliable and I need to find a more robust solution. I'm looking for a solution that will preserve the drive data in the event of system lock ups or crashes.

Can anyone give me some advice here please?

Many thanks.

Scott
 
Hi Grant

Thanks for the advice, I'll try this and see if it can breathe life back into the drives. The drives are brand new which makes it even more frustrating!

Hope life is treating you well Grant.

Best wishes

Scott
 
As Grant says, try recovery on the failed drives, but personally I'd only try it on one of the failed drives. Every recovery attempt/repower potentially corrupts a bad disc further.

If it doesn't recover then you could consider professional recovery on the other, if you have the budget.

The other thing would be to do all this on another trusted computer system entirely, new cables and all, if you are worried about the reliability of the one you used on this occasion. Also make sure you power via a UPS to avoid potential power issues.
 
Thanks Eric,

Good advice, I need a way to get my one good drive 100% securely copied and backed up as I cannot risk data loss, so perhaps I should find a good data recovery company in the UK & ask their advice.

Frustrating as I'm always very carefully with backups. :o(

Scott
 
The alternative, which is what recovery specialists do, is a one time byte for byte clone of the suspect drive, and then attempt recovery on the clone, rather than keep attempting recovery on the drive with the original data.

Some of the standalone dual hard drive docks have a hardware clone mode eg:
http://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-firewire...ing-station-for-2-5-3-5-sata-hard-drives-p499
http://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-firewire...ing-station-for-2-5-3-5-sata-hard-drives-p513

I'm sure Google will come up with other alternatives, both hardware and software based.
 
I'm a big fan of Data Rescue from Prosoft, which has saved my fanny on a few major crashes in years past. Be warned that it takes a good solid 24 hours to recover 1TB, and you'll need a blank drive of the same size as the crashed drive for the recovery.

http://www.prosofteng.com/
 
I've had a similar thing happen, but with a RAID 5 array. I ran Disk Warrior on it and it found the directory to have become corrupt and fixed it in only a few minutes. I've used Data Rescue in the past as well and it works, but you'll spend A LOT of time recovering files and then renaming them and reorganizing them, especially if it's R3D's that are split up into 4GB chunks. So try Disk Warrior first, and whatever you do don't initialize or erase or re-partition those drives. The data is still there.

Also, I've always been very leery about using those external bare hard drive docks. I don't trust them.
 
Mike Halper said:
I've had a similar thing happen, but with a RAID 5 array. I ran Disk Warrior on it and it found the directory to have become corrupt and fixed it in only a few minutes. I've used Data Rescue in the past as well and it works, but you'll spend A LOT of time recovering files and then renaming them and reorganizing them, especially if it's R3D's that are split up into 4GB chunks. So try Disk Warrior first, and whatever you do don't initialize or erase or re-partition those drives. The data is still there.

Also, I've always been very leery about using those external bare hard drive docks. I don't trust them.
Click to expand...

On what basis do you not trust the bare hard drive docks? You do have to be very careful to correctly mount and unmount, depower before connection/disconnection, and observe static precautions, but other than that?
 
Right now, I don't trust them that's for sure!

I've tried Disk Warrior but no luck - trouble is the drive is not showing up on my system. When I connect it via the external FW800 drive caddy, it tells me the drive is not recognised and asks me to initialise it which obviously I don't want to do.

I'm going to look at the Prosoft software next.

Thanks for all your support and help guys, much appreciated.

Moral is NEVER EVER trust hard drives backup data - LTO is the way to go!!

Best wishes

Scott
 
This won't help you for now, but...

I use external hard drive docks for recovering drives or testing, but not in an ongoing basis...too many chances to zap the drive electrically. Personally, I've never had an issue with firewire 400 or 800 doing anything to my drives, in over 15 years. I've used the NewerTech Guardian Maximus drives for around 7-8 years and they have been awesome. They are mirrored by default and can't be changed...if you had a couple of those, you'd have 4 copies of data (2 units with 2 drives each, mirrored), with your LTO backup, would be a better system, I believe.
 
ericyoung said:
On what basis do you not trust the bare hard drive docks? You do have to be very careful to correctly mount and unmount, depower before connection/disconnection, and observe static precautions, but other than that?
Click to expand...

Shaun Cammack said:
I use external hard drive docks for recovering drives or testing, but not in an ongoing basis...too many chances to zap the drive electrically. Personally, I've never had an issue with firewire 400 or 800 doing anything to my drives, in over 15 years. I've used the NewerTech Guardian Maximus drives for around 7-8 years and they have been awesome. They are mirrored by default and can't be changed...if you had a couple of those, you'd have 4 copies of data (2 units with 2 drives each, mirrored), with your LTO backup, would be a better system, I believe.
Click to expand...

For exactly that basis, Eric. Those docks leave the drive electronics open to the elements and I don't see that as a good thing, especially when dealing with important data. Also, drives aren't really locked into those docks. They can easily just get bumped or moved around, potentially causing disaster. Always put a bare drive in a proper enclosure. They make hot-swap bays for a reason.
 
Mike Halper said:
For exactly that basis, Eric. Those docks leave the drive electronics open to the elements and I don't see that as a good thing, especially when dealing with important data. Also, drives aren't really locked into those docks. They can easily just get bumped or moved around, potentially causing disaster. Always put a bare drive in a proper enclosure. They make hot-swap bays for a reason.
Click to expand...

That's using them in a non sensible way - they are obviously not a replacement for an enclosure. But for the purposes of hardware cloning in a controlled environment they are absolutely fine. I would never use them as a normal location production backup solution. Like any solution, use tools in the right situation and only if when knowing how to use them correctly.
 
I suggest inserting the one good drive and a new empty backup drive into the Mac itself. Avoid any from the batch of failed drives.

There is a 99.9% chance it will mount and copy fine so instead if spending a lot of time with the failed backups, I would move forward with this.
 
Yes, I'm thinking the same. A drive installed internally in the Mac Pro should be much more robust in the event of a lock up or crash.

The external FW800 drive caddy's cannot be relied upon as my story proves.

We have even had a Raid 6 unit die on us when we lost a drive. This should not happen but it did so NEVER be complacent with backups. I truly think LTO tape is the only solution to trust for now.

Best wishes

Scott
 
Scott Brown said:
We have even had a Raid 6 unit die on us when we lost a drive. This should not happen but it did so NEVER be complacent with backups. I truly think LTO tape is the only solution to trust for now.
Click to expand...
I have been in situations where a RAID controller card died and wiped out a 20TB server in ten seconds. We had backups, but it took 48 hours to do a full restore, and the client was close to suing us over the delays on that. We wound up completing everything by the deadline, but it was very, very stressful for everybody involved.

I have also seen situations where LTO and DTF tapes have failed -- even multiple tapes -- so to me, the only solution is multiple backups spread out over different formats.
 
Hi Marc

I feel your pain, 20 TB data loss is a nightmare!!!

We are generating larger and larger amounts of data so this is only going to get more challenging as we move forward.

Interesting to hear of your bad LTO experiences as this appears to be the most robust solution currently available.

Scott
 
I still think LTO is the best currently-available backup solution, but I'd also make sure that you have additional backup formats available, especially before the project is completed. Having multiple hard drives and​ LTO is not a bad idea.
 
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