Help recover my data please. Freaking out.

[Redcoat]

Yes, me too. There but for the grace of God go I ...

 

[cyberjock]

Recovering from a pair of mirrored drives is probably much easier, than a RAIDzX pool.

Honestly, this is probably the only reason the data was recoverable. A mirror is basically exactly like a single disk, it's just 2 disks with identical data. That makes recovery relatively simple.

 

[3dmdlr]

I mentioned the who earlier in the thread but www.datarecovery.com is the place (remove it if it breaks any rules) Even though I was getting a little testy towards the eventual end, of which I did not know when that would be until that day arrived, they were always gracious and understanding of my ever changing attitude about the whole situation. Pretty good establishment I'd say.

 

[Z300M]

I mentioned the who earlier in the thread but www.datarecovery.com is the place (remove it if it breaks any rules) Even though I was getting a little testy towards the eventual end, of which I did not know when that would be until that day arrived, they were always gracious and understanding of my ever changing attitude about the whole situation. Pretty good establishment I'd say.

I see that one of the testimonials on their Web site refers to a "no data, no charge" policy, but it had seemed to me from your earlier posts that it was going to cost you whether they retrieved your data or not. Can you clarify?

 

[3dmdlr]

Point to the post that says that and I will clarify as that was not my intention. It was always known from all 3 different services I spoke with that there was a "no data no charge policy". I am thinking that is pretty standard and most likely rarely applied. Of all the reviews for datarecovery I think I only read 1 or 2 that was a no recovery situation and yet they still had decent things to say about them.

 

[Z300M]

Point to the post that says that and I will clarify as that was not my intention. It was always known from all 3 different services I spoke with that there was a "no data no charge policy". I am thinking that is pretty standard and most likely rarely applied. Of all the reviews for datarecovery I think I only read 1 or 2 that was a no recovery situation and yet they still had decent things to say about them.

I'm sorry, it's a long while since this thread started, and I was going by a remembered impression -- and my memory isn't as good as it used to be.

 

[3dmdlr]

np, no worries on my end, just want to make sure I didn't mislead. Bottom line is, I was quoted 800.00-5900.00 from 4 different places. I chose datarecovery.com because if need be I could physically drive the the lab location in IL. I am currently copying the ext I received back to 2 other ext drives that will be my starting point for data security moving forward. Having only 1 copy of my data at the moment is fairly nerve racking

 

[Sir.Robin]

Great it ended good for yah :)

Qurious... what will be your next storage setup..? ;)

 

[Darren Myers]

np, no worries on my end, just want to make sure I didn't mislead. Bottom line is, I was quoted 800.00-5900.00 from 4 different places. I chose datarecovery.com because if need be I could physically drive the the lab location in IL. I am currently copying the ext I received back to 2 other ext drives that will be my starting point for data security moving forward. Having only 1 copy of my data at the moment is fairly nerve racking

Great it ended good for yah :)

Qurious... what will be your next storage setup..? ;)

Now youre given the option to redo your NAS and your backup strategy all over and make it fool proof lol, some people dont get this lucky.

I am curious too what you'll do for NAS and backups

 

[3dmdlr]

The short term is that I have immediately made 2 backups on 2 separate wd passport drives. 1 for the gun safe and 1 for the bank box. The 2tb ext drive sent back with the data will now be a destination drive with the recovered data as well as my working directories. An additional 1tb internal drive will also have the same image as the ext 2tb drive. These will be continually synced using bvckup2. Occasionally I will rerun the passport backups to keep them somewhat current. This gets me backed up and redundant right out of the gate. It was very scary having only the one data drive until it was 4 other places :) Long term and a lot more money, I am a little too shocked to attempt the NAS myself again. I have narrowed it down to a couple off the shelf solutions, both 4 drive capacity and will load it up with 4 wd reds and also have one on the shelf ready to go. Also looked in to the FreeNAS Mini. Searching for HDD is hard to nail down which size is the most stable size, maybe 3tb or 4tb?? From what I have read, RAID10 is the way to go??? I also read this http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/very informative. But given the lack of completely understanding it all I am still aimlessly wandering out there. I will just keep reading and hope it all starts to make more sense. Bottom line is I want the most safe, recoverable setup (am willing to take a hit on performance since its just storage) that tells me when and which drives is failing with easy instructions as to how to hot swap the failing drive. Anyone care to suggest a recipe? Keep it simple for the layman please

 

[Darren Myers]

I use 3 x7 drive RAIDz3, i use 7 4Tb hdds, 7 2Tb hdds, and then another 7 2Tb hdds. The 4Tb drives are all RED's (not pro's), and all the 2's are RE4 drives, i feel RAIDz3 for me is best because im theory i could loose 1 drive, and then during a resliver loose another drive or 2....hopefully not as i run both short and long SMART tests on a schedule, and i use the lovely scripts from the forums to get the reports once a week and jazz.

I like the mini, but i feel it doesnt offer enough for what *i* personally needed, so i went with a 24 bay supermicro :p .

RAIDz2 is the RAID10 equivalent.

Check out the calculator here before you decide on what size drives/how many https://jsfiddle.net/Biduleohm/hfqdpbLm/10/embedded/result/

I also use Crashplan Pro to backup my entire server, when i say ENTIRE i mean all of it....i have 27Tb in the cloud atm with crashplan, some of it is archived and some of it is active. But i also selected crashplan to never delete it when deleted off server/drive..so in theory i have stuff from the first backup of crashplan to now

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

RAIDz2 is the RAID10 equivalent.

Um, not exactly. Striped mirrors is the ZFS equivalent of RAID10. RAIDZ2 is more like RAID6.

RAIDZ3 is the configuration that can tolerate the most drive failures without data loss.

I think saying you should just use mirrors, as in the linked article, is oversimplifying, but it's right on the money as far as insisting you have a backup.

 

[cyberjock]

So I've got questions...

What exactly did you mail them? Both of the bad hard drives?

What exactly did they mail back?

What is the 5 day thing you mentioned?

I'm trying to figure out if they had to do actual 'zfs' recovery or if they simply imaged both of the bad disks onto new disks, then did something like a zfs scrub (or simply copied the files off the zpool).