How to lose 800GB of data real quick

[Gremlin]

Here's some easy steps to turning a lot of expensive hardware and years of collecting stuff into a paperweight:

- You have machines that run 8GB of ram, but that particular motherboard only supports 8GB, you're maxxed out.
- You happen to have 6 Kingston sticks of DDR3, 4GB per stick in your possession for a while
- You have your great pc at home, running Core i7, wait, thats DDR3! Even better, maximum memory support is 24GB.
- You take said sticks home, gawd, wouldn't it be cool for the pc to show 24GB of memory?
- After dinner, you head off to play. The PC doesn't seem to be in the mood, constantly struggling to start (and getting to various stages), even on 1-2 sticks. Ooh, new bios is out, its beta, but that should be ok. After a bit more playing, nup, still big issues, oh well.
- Get the machine back to normal, and boot it up. hmmmm here comes the raid management... lets see, volume0 is fine, volume1 has failed.. thats not good.
- More details... 2 disks in a 4 disk raid 5 have decided they're not part of the raid any more.
- Done. 800GB approx of stuff lost. linux iso's of varying types. Deliberately, the real important stuff was within the main raid 1, so its fine
- Backups? pah, we don't need those do we?

Further action... data recovery takes 16-20 hours to do a scan, at first everything was corrupted to high hell, but I'm finally getting some results and look like I may get a few hundred gb back.

Time to keep a backup

[Blackshear]

Sounds about time for another LAN

[Gremlin]

Sounds about time for another LAN

Also handy we have several 1tb drives empty in the office... a few have been appropriated for the mission of extracting as much data as possible

Last night, in a bad mood, I did a light OC on the core i7, and started thinking expensive thoughts of raid 6, 6+ disks (which requires more expensive raid cards etc), then thoughts of... well, if you're going that far, 1tb drives are a bit small almost 2 years on...

After a few slaps, those thoughts started to subside... who knew I could reason with myself!

[davebullet]

This reminds me of a haiku that can soothe in these weary times...

Chaos reigns within
Resent, repent and reboot
Order shall return

[riffer]

Ah yes, we've all been there dude.

Sometimes I'm sure my mother was right when she used to say leave well enough alone...

[Sidewinder]

please dont tell me you were playing wow

[p.dath]

Just like motorcycles, the best lessons have to be learnt the hard way.

[ajturbo]

wow... i would have resorted to the "BHT" and see where that got me....

[TOTO]

backup or ...........seppuku

[Gremlin]

Sometimes I'm sure my mother was right when she used to say leave well enough alone...

Well... yeah. It was just meant to be a quick experiment

please dont tell me you were playing wow

Never played it in my life. If I do get a chance to game, current crop is CoD5, Crysis or Far Cry 2.

Just like motorcycles, the best lessons have to be learnt the hard way.

I guess there is a lot of irony here. Full backup management on client networks, before we do anything, backups are done, etc, standard stuff. But this is just some ram on my home system, besides, I don't REALLY need it... until its gone

wow... i would have resorted to the "BHT" and see where that got me....

Have to ask... BHT?

On a side note, it looks like getdataback is handling the GPT partition reasonably ok.

[PirateJafa]

I lost 1.2TB when a PSU fried two harddrives in in a eight-drive RAID5 array.

Completely Squiggles' fault, of course.

That ripped my pants slightly, needless to say.

[naphazoline]

Not sure if you've heard of it,but the program called "Acronis true image",is what i use.

Can do a complete clone of your hard drive,operating system,and everything,so that if your main drive/s fuck out,can just clone it back from a secondary/extenal.

Now i realise that you've got a shitload of drive space to copy,but you can stipulate exactly what you want to copy/backup.

Waaaay faster then doing a full recovery and re-installing everything again.

[StoneY]

Ouch- only 800Gb?

Shit happens I guess

[breakaway]

Further action... data recovery takes 16-20 hours to do a scan, at first everything was corrupted to high hell, but I'm finally getting some results and look like I may get a few hundred gb back.

Nope. A couple months from now you'll go to watch something, and then find its skipping like a bitch through 1hr in.

[Gremlin]

Not sure if you've heard of it,but the program called "Acronis true image",is what i use.

Yep, been using image style backup and recovery software for over 3 years now. In this situation, the massive initial image is a hinderance, especially when doing the next full backup, and compression won't make much difference to a lot of the files that are already compressed formats.

I'll probably look at rsync to replicate to another drive, which will only copy the changes, rather than a full backup

Nope. A couple months from now you'll go to watch something, and then find its skipping like a bitch through 1hr in.

We'll see... needless to say, lucky I ain't a client. Massive hours simply trawling through, seeing what is genuine etc. Already found some classic stuff like Dinner for One, which I haven't seen anywhere else, and seems to play well.