This is from the old days of server maintenance. And I do mean old, like 2002:
First, don't trust the raid device, the drives may still be good. If you had an existing spare drive, one that was never installed, you could remove all the drives (LABELING THE BAD ONE), put only that new one in and boot up. That can trick the raid drivers into working again. But it might not work with just one drive. If it does, cool! Initialize the drive and pull it out. Reinstall the others, boot up and see and see what you have. If still bad, then install the extra for the bad one and see what you have. Lastly you could buy a shell, install each drive and copy off the data. You'd at least get something... Try cnet.com for some easy data recovery tools. Good luck, go to Del Mar... Jeffrey Evans Photographer Mgr. of Visual Resources Princeton Univ. Art Museum (609) 865-2562 > On Jul 22, 2014, at 4:28 PM, "Cairie Riney" <cairie.bird at gmail.com> wrote: > > Hello All, > Our photo server crashed! Sadly, we didn't have a backup for the last two > months of work. We have learned our lesson. > > Our tech company wants to charge us more than we can afford. We are a very > small non-profit and will just have to walk away from that data if we can't > find an alternative. We are looking for other companies or options to > retrieve our data. We had photographs and metadata that cannot be reentered > because some of the original albums were disposed of after digitization. > > Here's the lowdown on the server: > > We had one bad drive in a Buffalo RAID 5 server. We replaced the drive in > drive bay 2 and waited for the device to rebuild the RAID onto the new > drive. In a RAID 5 configuration the data can be recovered unless you lose > more than 1 drive. After a few days of trying to rebuild, the device > errored and said that the drive in bay 4 was also bad. We replaced the bad > drive and hoped that the device could still rebuild. While it was trying > to do that, the tech team attempted to recover data from the bad drive. > The recovery took a few days to scan the device for files and returned > nothing. The Buffalo device attempted to rebuild but was not able to > rebuild from 2 failed drives. Since an evaluation from the tech pros was > free that was the route we took. Then they said it would cost more than we > could handle. > > Any suggestions? Non-profit discounts, etc? > > Thank you so much for reading all that and any and all of your advice. > > Best, > Cairie Riney > Assistant Archivist > Lambda Archives of San Diego > lambdaarchives.org > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://mcn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l > > The MCN-L archives can be found at: > http://mcn.edu/pipermail/mcn-l/
