I'm really sorry to hear all that. Before you make that phone call, I will recommend: As soon as you say data is gone, they're going to wonder "what about backups." What you've said here about the ntbackup image not restoring has been very vague. So whatever happens, I'll recommend really examining the possibility of restoring the backup, and if it's not working, to really understand and be able to explain clearly precisely why it's not restorable.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard Maloley II Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2010 10:08 AM To: Edward Ned Harvey Cc: LOPSA Technical Discussions Subject: Re: [lopsa-tech] Windows SBS 2003 Lost 2 Months Of Data - Help! Thanks everyone! @Luke Hankins: Thank you for the wish of good luck. @Steven Kurylo: The new RAID set was for user data, to replace a single hard drive environment. Completely independant from the OS mirror set, and not using the same RAID controller. @Daniel Pittman: Yes, I believe you are correct - Silicon Image and I definitely think that it is of the lower quality kind. Apparently I did have too much confidence in the RAID array telling me when something was wrong. I believe that you might be correct that a disk dropped out for a while, but I have no good way of verification without pulling the drives and testing them one at a time. Which I'm not sure what will happen when I put both of them back together in the RAID set - I don't think it gives me any options to set a master. @Edward Ned Harvey: Small Business Server has an updated ntbackup that will backup your Exchange data - it's worked in the past and I have a backup file, it just won't restore the data for some reason. All - Thank you so much for your comments and suggestions. I appreciate it greatly. At this point I think I might need to tell my customer that the data is most likely gone. I really feel that there was a problem with the RAID controller - a mirrored set should always be identical unless the controller encountered a problem. I think the only thing that would have prevented this is if we performed a full server backup before I began the work - it just didn't seem necessary to unplug and plug in some hard drives. Monday is going to be a fun call... Thanks, Richard "I've lost a machine... Literally _lost_. It responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is." On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> wrote: > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf > Of Richard Maloley II > > I unplugged all the SATA cables and put it all back together. I am > fairly confident that the two drives for the OS were reconnected to the > proper ports on the RAID card, otherwise I feel the RAID BIOS would > have given me an error message. Oh dear. > My customer called the next day and complained that they are missing > all their email/calendar entries after 2/11/2010. Nothing is there > after that date except for new items that came in after I left for the > night. > > I checked the event logs - same thing! Log files are all blank from > 2/11/2010 until 4/14/2010. You are certainly at high risk right now. And the longer things go on, the higher your risk becomes. Here's what I suggest: Disclaimer: This process could in fact cause risk for you. You're responsible for your own actions if you follow my advice. I'm just some random stranger on the Internet, and you'd be irresponsible to take my advice unless you know what you're doing even better than I do. Shutdown, disconnect all drives. Connect *only* one of the OS disks. Boot up, see if it's ok. If not ... Shutdown, connect *only* the other OS disk. Boot up, see if it's ok. If not ... all hope is lost. For what it's worth: ntbackup is not sufficient to backup your OS. You can use it to backup your data files, on your data drive, but not your OS. Even if you have valid backup, of the OS, the restore path is to reinstall windows, and repeat everything that's ever been done on that OS. That is not a recovery plan if you ask me. In fact, you said, email and calendar items were lost. You're not using ntbackup to backup Exchange, are you? You can't do that. Also, you need to revisit your system backup process. You can use something like "dd" to make a complete byte-for-byte image of your OS disk, but in order to restore, you'd have to have the same or identically equivalent hardware to restore onto. This is one of the areas where virtualization is very valuable. If your windows server were running as a VM, you could back it up, copy to new hardware, and boot it up again with no issues.
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