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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

RAID CRASH NEED RECPVERY RECOMMEND NYC

T

Tarquin Cardona

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Hoping someone here can point me to a solid choice for data recovery. We just had a CalDigit 9TB raid lock up. And it was being used on a project for editing so in the Raid0 configuration.
Wondering who folks here may have had good experience with in the New York City area.
 
Data rescue 4, but the first thing you will need is another volume to recover too.

David
 
Thanks David. Will look into this. Hopefully avoiding going full bore to a data recovery house like DiskSavers.
 
RAID-0 is the digital equivalent to Russian Roulette. I wish you luck. I would recommend a professional data service. If you have all the data/footage backed up or stored on other media (I sure hope you do), you may be better off to just start over on the edit as data recovery efforts can get very expensive in a hurry and take time. Depending on what is needed for the recovery, costs can be all over the place. Sometimes simple electrical or mechanical repairs can be made to a drive and you'll be up and running again. If the drive crashed hard with head or motor failures, the costs shoot up quickly. And the odds of recovering all your data become less favorable. Could be the RAID enclosure/ controller that failed and not drives. Could be a power supply too. If there is a drive failure involving motors or heads, recovery software isn't going to help you and powering up or using the drives could cause further damage. So on that note, I would definitely recommend seeking some professional advice and experience, that can directly inspect and investigate, before going much further if you're not sure of the type of failure you have.
 
For our walk of shame, we used Data Recovery Experts (6 ave &39 st) . Not the most economical, but they left us with a sense of well-being during the consultation. They WILL crack the drives opens for a forensic inspection and provide a quote.

RE: software recovery tools. Many swear by them. But in my attempts to recover RAID volumes, the data generally returned fragmented.
 
Thanks to everyone here for responding. Yes. It is a walk of shame to the extent that we used the RAID unaware that it was configured RAID0. And now that the way this works has been explained to me I would never do this ever again as it is an outdated unnecessary and absurd way to use a drive. For anyone reading this who has not had experience with this yet and is using a RAID, make sure you are in RAID5 at least, as this will give you some of the protection a RAID is intended for. In RAID0 the drive fragments the material over all its drives for speed. The downside is that if one drive fails, the data cannot be easily (if at all) put back together like Humpty Dumpty. The saving grace for me here is the job is done and shipped, and so this was discovered as we went to back up the footage for deep storage.

The quotes I am getting are in the thousands to do a retrieval, with the warning that it may not be possible. Best case is the unit failed not the disks as Jeff mentioned above. We shall see. The diagnostic is free at least.

Thanks again.
 
Tarquin Cardona said:
Thanks to everyone here for responding. Yes. It is a walk of shame to the extent that we used the RAID unaware that it was configured RAID0. And now that the way this works has been explained to me I would never do this ever again as it is an outdated unnecessary and absurd way to use a drive.
Click to expand...
Naw, it's fine as long as you know upfront that you're walking a tightrope, and you have to be keenly aware of the need to do backups. RAID0's are still used when high-speed playback is the single most important factor above everything else. But ya can't go into it and not have a backup.

I used a RAID0 setup for three years with absolutely no problems, but I went for a RAID5 about four months ago, and I have to say there is a little more security with that setup. And I still use the RAID0 (unplugged most of the time) as a backup drive for projects.
 
Automated backup software is the way to go to prevent data loss. Humans are too error prone to trusted to do regular manual backups. The backup device could be tape device, single hard formatted as OSX, NTFS or Unix/Linux (no FAT or exFat) or RAID storage with parity.

Original media or other critical data should not be archived/backed up on a RAID0 device. Cloud storage for most is too costly or too slow for huge data backups or retrieval.

A successful data recovery requires access to the disk (s) directory tree. RAID0 doesn't contain or maintain a directory structure, hence the speed bonus of RAID0. One could theoretically recover small files if they resided on the same drive. But in the case of a deep directory tree, big files will be written in a splintered fashion across multiple drives, making recovery unlikely. Single drives with a formatted with a robust file system (mentioned above ) have a good chance of recovery because the directory tree is redundantly written in multiple place. Of course, given drive (s ) have no mechanical damage.

So again RAID0 is not a dirty word in a post environment. But one must ask the question: If this primary work/archive device fails, am I losing a session of changes, a day or more of work, or even worse everything. RAID0 at best should be used as a scratch drive or intermediate drive as a best practice. There is absolutely no safety net included.

Sorry for the preach, but the recourse is expensive.
 
Do you have any automated software that you can recommend??? - currently have an 18TB Raid 5 setup which I have been backing up manually to individual 8TB drives.

I have looked around and tested a few different pieces of software but never found anything that has worked well (always had the issue of the Raid being bigger than the 8TB drives)
 
Marc Wielage said:
Naw, it's fine as long as you know upfront that you're walking a tightrope, and you have to be keenly aware of the need to do backups. RAID0's are still used when high-speed playback is the single most important factor above everything else. But ya can't go into it and not have a backup.

I used a RAID0 setup for three years with absolutely no problems, but I went for a RAID5 about four months ago, and I have to say there is a little more security with that setup. And I still use the RAID0 (unplugged most of the time) as a backup drive for projects.
Click to expand...

I use a SSD Raid0 for cache, which is typically dumped at the end of each project, and 2 G Speed Es Pros in a Mini-SAS Raid5 configuration for footage and final renders. So far ... so good.
 
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