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GLBHDD Data recovery.
56
This is in response to this thread, https://www.renderhub.com/forum/14512/im-out-for-a-while
Some years ago I bought an inexpensive 4 bay drive caddy that could be configured as different flavours of RAID or as discrete drives. I choose RAID 5 because it offered data redundancy, and stuffed it with 4, 4 TB enterprise drives from Western Digital. I filled it with all my Poser and Daz stuff plus my much treasured Playboy collection. It saw very little use after that, only getting purchased 3D stuff added to it. One year and one picosecond after purchase (and expiration of the one year warranty) the lights on the front panel started flashing like a Christmas tree and I could no longer read it. I ran to the manufacturer's site (some company in Vancouver) and begged for help. I got a short email back telling me that the warranty had expired and that I was one my own. I was incensed and sent a pile of nastygrams and even called on the Better Business Bureau. They told me that they had numerous complaints outstanding against the company and there was nothing they could do. Only then did I talk to the IT folks where I worked (Canadian government). They chuckled and told me that that company was pretty much a scam and that their products where garbage.
---Lesson 1, talk to the REAL pros first. The people who move and archive data as a job. Through my job I was able to visit the Central Negative Library
and the Canadian Archives. They are digitizing stuff going back over a hundred years and have massive archives.
Armed with advice from places like the CNL, Tom's Hardware forums, the subreddit R/Datahoarders and my computer guy in town, I first ensured that the four drives where labeled with their positions in the NAS gizmo. I then downloaded trial versions of ALL the programs that promised...absolutely promised that they could recover ANYTHING! Because the NAS controller had died, the procedure was to take each individual drive, place it in a caddy (NexStar caddies are recommended), plug it in and let their super, amazing, infallible, guaranteed to work perfectly, software do it's job. Some programs sat there and did nothing. There where no errors or prompts, they just sat there. Others looked that there was progress, but after hours, days, and in one case two solid weeks! delivered exactly zero results. I got either gibberish or large empty directories.
After that HUGE disappointment I gave up for a couple of years. At some point I had a thought and took the main board out of the NAS and copied the name and numbers of the large chips on the board. A quickee search identified two of the chips as controller chips from some company in Taiwan. I emailed them about my dilemma and asked/begged/pleaded for help. Two short day later I received a very nice email from someone there that was completely sympathetic and gave me some direction. He explained that while they made the chip, the NAS board and controller where made by this other company. He had already forwarded my first email to this company (also in Tiawan) and asked them for help on my behalf. Now THAT'S customer service! The next day I got an email from the second company who where also very sympathetic. They said that this unit was long out of production and that they no longer had spare parts. They recommended that I buy another unit of the same model, used or old stock from Ebay or Amazon. They even provided a few links to such items on Amazon. Again, THIS is customer service!
I bought a used unit (a slightly newer version) from Amazon and had it a week or so later.
Now we're getting somewhere! Company 2 (the manufacturer of the NAS) had told me that as long as the drives where functional, the new unit should ('should') recognize the RAID array and read it. I installed the drives in the proper order, plugged her in, said a prayer to the spirits of data storage and turned her on. I was rewarded with green status lights on the front panel and Windows recognized the array. I peed my little panties in glee and set Unstoppable Copier to copy the whole thing both to another drive in a NexStar caddy AND to my one computer. It took hours but in the end everything (including my massive Playboy collection) was now safe in two places. The newish NAS unit could also be configured as a simple caddy so I selected that on the front panel and used the Windows utility to format each drive in regular old simple NTFS. While I now have a sabrent drive, I still use that replacement unit as a caddy for the 4 4TB drives.
With all my 'lost' data now unlost, I emailed the sleazebags that had sold the thing, detailing my recovery procedure and telling them that they needed to learn some customer service if they expected to remain in business. I also CC'ed the email to the Better Business Bureau. Naturally I got no feedback so on a whim I asked a long time buddy of mine in Vancouver if he'd drop by the company's office. A couple days later Dan sent me a picture of the company's storefront. It was papered over with a big 'For Lease' sign on it. Serves ya right!
I have that NAS/storage unit, a Sabrent drive caddy and extra BIG HDDs on both of my desktops. The data is verified once a year and I add new stuff the first of each month. It's more than just my Daz purchases and some naughty Playboy pictures (yes I subscribed to the site for years). I'm scanning the ancient pictures from a stack of family photo albums and CAN'T lose this stuff. There's hundreds of pictures of my mother and her family in Austria under Nazi rule. You can't go too far with protecting your digital stuff, I know that some banks even offer protected storage for HDDs. They have small vaults, like safety deposit boxes that are lined with copper or 'mu' metal to block electromagnetic radiation that can slowly delete data (called 'bit rot').
Some years ago I bought an inexpensive 4 bay drive caddy that could be configured as different flavours of RAID or as discrete drives. I choose RAID 5 because it offered data redundancy, and stuffed it with 4, 4 TB enterprise drives from Western Digital. I filled it with all my Poser and Daz stuff plus my much treasured Playboy collection. It saw very little use after that, only getting purchased 3D stuff added to it. One year and one picosecond after purchase (and expiration of the one year warranty) the lights on the front panel started flashing like a Christmas tree and I could no longer read it. I ran to the manufacturer's site (some company in Vancouver) and begged for help. I got a short email back telling me that the warranty had expired and that I was one my own. I was incensed and sent a pile of nastygrams and even called on the Better Business Bureau. They told me that they had numerous complaints outstanding against the company and there was nothing they could do. Only then did I talk to the IT folks where I worked (Canadian government). They chuckled and told me that that company was pretty much a scam and that their products where garbage.
---Lesson 1, talk to the REAL pros first. The people who move and archive data as a job. Through my job I was able to visit the Central Negative Library
and the Canadian Archives. They are digitizing stuff going back over a hundred years and have massive archives.
Armed with advice from places like the CNL, Tom's Hardware forums, the subreddit R/Datahoarders and my computer guy in town, I first ensured that the four drives where labeled with their positions in the NAS gizmo. I then downloaded trial versions of ALL the programs that promised...absolutely promised that they could recover ANYTHING! Because the NAS controller had died, the procedure was to take each individual drive, place it in a caddy (NexStar caddies are recommended), plug it in and let their super, amazing, infallible, guaranteed to work perfectly, software do it's job. Some programs sat there and did nothing. There where no errors or prompts, they just sat there. Others looked that there was progress, but after hours, days, and in one case two solid weeks! delivered exactly zero results. I got either gibberish or large empty directories.
After that HUGE disappointment I gave up for a couple of years. At some point I had a thought and took the main board out of the NAS and copied the name and numbers of the large chips on the board. A quickee search identified two of the chips as controller chips from some company in Taiwan. I emailed them about my dilemma and asked/begged/pleaded for help. Two short day later I received a very nice email from someone there that was completely sympathetic and gave me some direction. He explained that while they made the chip, the NAS board and controller where made by this other company. He had already forwarded my first email to this company (also in Tiawan) and asked them for help on my behalf. Now THAT'S customer service! The next day I got an email from the second company who where also very sympathetic. They said that this unit was long out of production and that they no longer had spare parts. They recommended that I buy another unit of the same model, used or old stock from Ebay or Amazon. They even provided a few links to such items on Amazon. Again, THIS is customer service!
I bought a used unit (a slightly newer version) from Amazon and had it a week or so later.
Now we're getting somewhere! Company 2 (the manufacturer of the NAS) had told me that as long as the drives where functional, the new unit should ('should') recognize the RAID array and read it. I installed the drives in the proper order, plugged her in, said a prayer to the spirits of data storage and turned her on. I was rewarded with green status lights on the front panel and Windows recognized the array. I peed my little panties in glee and set Unstoppable Copier to copy the whole thing both to another drive in a NexStar caddy AND to my one computer. It took hours but in the end everything (including my massive Playboy collection) was now safe in two places. The newish NAS unit could also be configured as a simple caddy so I selected that on the front panel and used the Windows utility to format each drive in regular old simple NTFS. While I now have a sabrent drive, I still use that replacement unit as a caddy for the 4 4TB drives.
With all my 'lost' data now unlost, I emailed the sleazebags that had sold the thing, detailing my recovery procedure and telling them that they needed to learn some customer service if they expected to remain in business. I also CC'ed the email to the Better Business Bureau. Naturally I got no feedback so on a whim I asked a long time buddy of mine in Vancouver if he'd drop by the company's office. A couple days later Dan sent me a picture of the company's storefront. It was papered over with a big 'For Lease' sign on it. Serves ya right!
I have that NAS/storage unit, a Sabrent drive caddy and extra BIG HDDs on both of my desktops. The data is verified once a year and I add new stuff the first of each month. It's more than just my Daz purchases and some naughty Playboy pictures (yes I subscribed to the site for years). I'm scanning the ancient pictures from a stack of family photo albums and CAN'T lose this stuff. There's hundreds of pictures of my mother and her family in Austria under Nazi rule. You can't go too far with protecting your digital stuff, I know that some banks even offer protected storage for HDDs. They have small vaults, like safety deposit boxes that are lined with copper or 'mu' metal to block electromagnetic radiation that can slowly delete data (called 'bit rot').
! REPORT
Take the time and hard copy print some of those precious family photos too.
REPLY
! REPORT
Bobb
Karma: 1,294
Sun, Apr 05I'm doing that. I have a nice Epson printer and know colour management. One of my nieces was especially close to 'Oma' (my Mom) and she got stories that Mom never shared with anyone else. She's written them down and we've been working on a comprehensive history of my Mom. My niece has taken quite an interest in genealogy, has found some relatives in Graz, Austria and is adding what she learns to the history. My only regret is that I didn't pump my Mom for details while we still had her. She passed at 90 leaving a lot of questions unanswered.
ArtbyMel
Karma: 14,744
Wed, Apr 08My dad had a lot of stories. He was a bantam weight boxer when he was young, among the various stories he told me. He was deaf in one ear, so he could not enlist in WWII. He was sent to one of the work camps instead. That was the place he picked up boxing, bare knuckles no less!
My mom, not so much. Her father was a cruel SOB, and she, along with her mom, brothers and sister suffered a lot of physical abuse. So her stories are something I don't think about very often. Except for the ones about the big bands. She used to go to those with friends fairly often. Those were her favroite times to talk abut from her younger days.
My mom, not so much. Her father was a cruel SOB, and she, along with her mom, brothers and sister suffered a lot of physical abuse. So her stories are something I don't think about very often. Except for the ones about the big bands. She used to go to those with friends fairly often. Those were her favroite times to talk abut from her younger days.