Recovering data from a corrupted NAS (not an unRAID)

[tillkrueger]

aside from the amazing 15-disk 20TB unRAID server that i built 5 or 6 years ago and have had reliably running as my end-all backup server, i also have 2 LaCie 5big Network and 1 LaCie 5big Network II drives (each of them the 10TB version) that i picked up inexpensively...since i am leaving back to the USA (from Germany, where i had to spend the past 10 months for a severe brain-tumor operation and radiation/chemo-therapies) to teach another semester at the Parsons Graduate School of Design and Technology, i spent the past 2 weeks frantically trying to back up my data from the LaCie drives to the unRAID system, so free up at least one of the LaCie's to take with me as work drive....since i didn't receive my unRAID from the States until 2 weeks ago, i *had* to use the LaCie's without a possibility of backing them up (not enough space anywhere else)

 

near heart-stoppage ensued a few days ago, when during a long copy/backup operation the fuse to my upstairs work-room tripped, while doing the copy operation from one of the LaCie 5big Network drives with *all* of the data i generated during my 10 month stay here (about 7TB of timelapse photography, wedding and birthday photos, as well as design work on a half-dozen going client projects, and all of my course work for Parsons, amongst other things i am in denial about so far)...when the LaCie finally came back up after i got the fuse working again, it showed 6.8TB of 8TB free, meaning that pretty much all of my mentioned data is "gone".

 

now, i've set up networks for my various design and animation companies and employees since creating the first serial-based "sneaker net" render-farms with 20 Amiga computers back in '89 (when i created the first fully 3D-animated music video "Change Myself" with Todd Rundgren), so i'm not a total novice...i've had many situations during which directory trees got corrupted, and data seemed to be gone, only to be "found" again with tools like Diskwarrior or various other PC and Mac recovery software...but i know near nothing about Linux-based solutions, and my experience with NAS (vs. DAS) is also minute.

 

what can be done in an incident like this? pull out all the drives, put them in enclosures, hook them up to some sort of Linux machine, and use something like "mdadm" (as someone at LaCie suggested)? of course, i would probably have to know everything about block sizes and other parameters that define how a RAID5 in such a box is designed? if i haven't written anything over the "free" space on that NAS drive, is the chance pretty high that it's still recoverable, or is it a bleak situation?

 

anyone have any suggestions as to how to proceed? it's impossible for me to do anything about all this before i leave to the USA, but i could just let the drive sit and do it when i come back...or take that one with me and try to do something about it while in the USA...any pointers, as always, are greatly appreciated.

 

btw, as sexy as the LaCie drives look, but i've had a *LOT* of problems and lost data with LaCie's solutions over the years...not recommended, i'm afraid...thank God for unRAID!

[gfjardim]

If LaCie said they use md driver to manage the arrays, there are good chances that you can reconstruct your supposedly damaged array superblock IF they send you all the params used to create the array and IF you have the exact order each disk occupies at the array - eg. Disk X is md0, Disk y is md1, etc. Of course, you have to use a common Linux distribution instead of unRAID.

 

http://kevin.deldycke.com/2007/03/how-to-recover-a-raid-array-after-having-zero-ized-superblocks/

 

Recover the filesystem depends pretty much of the filesystem itself and the available utilities for recovery.

[tillkrueger]

hmmm...sounds like this may go beyond what i would be able to figure out without the help of a truly command line savvy type...it's been a real rough time, this past week, when your brain is forced to slowly accept one catastrophic realization after the other ("wait! don't say that *that* folder was on that disk as well!! omg, i can't believe that i have lost that, too..." and so on)...time to re-avaluate my work and methods again.

thanks, though!