Help recover my data please. Freaking out.

[Robert Trevellyan]

Fingers crossed.

I am researching a decent cloud service, 3.0 USB desktop HDD...

Just want to mention that as of the current stable release, FreeNAS support for USB 3.0 isn't that great. Other options for external storage include eSATA.

 

[anodos]

I think calling in the professionals was a good idea. Before I was in IT, my workplace's SAN dropped all of it's LUNS (poof! Gone!). That was when the IT guy realized that all the LTO tapes had been worn out and backups were silently failing. He spent a couple of days spinning wheels trying to get data back, and I got desperately afraid (losing the data would mean business shutting its doors). Although I despise doing such things, I went over his head and told the VP that we were risking losing all of our data and that we should contact a professional recovery service. We got all the data back (which probably easily represented a million in man hours), the company spent on the order of 40K on recovery, and we had some staffing changes.

 

[Darren Myers]

I think calling in the professionals was a good idea. Before I was in IT, my workplace's SAN dropped all of it's LUNS (poof! Gone!). That was when the IT guy realized that all the LTO tapes had been worn out and backups were silently failing. He spent a couple of days spinning wheels trying to get data back, and I got desperately afraid (losing the data would mean business shutting its doors). Although I despise doing such things, I went over his head and told the VP that we were risking losing all of our data and that we should contact a professional recovery service. We got all the data back (which probably easily represented a million in man hours), the company spent on the order of 40K on recovery, and we had some staffing changes.

This is why you test disaster recovery procedures, have cold storage, have a off site back that's *maybe* a few hours drive away, or have a "hot site" where all data is replicated too and the employees can walk into and log right in like nothing ever happened. :)

 

[anodos]

This is why you test disaster recovery procedures, have cold storage, have a off site back that's *maybe* a few hours drive away, or have a "hot site" where all data is replicated too and the employees can walk into and log right in like nothing ever happened. :)

That was a long time ago. You realize that 'small business contract IT' is usually a synonym for 'malpractice'. :)

 

[Darren Myers]

That was a long time ago. You realize that 'small business contract IT' is usually a synonym for 'malpractice'. :)

lol and thats why i dont work in small business anymore lol :P , i worked for a few outsourced IT companies and none seemed to be 100% competent in keeping backups or ever testing soooooo away i went to somewhere where i wont get canned because my higher ups didnt care, and when SHTF they can take the hit not me.

 

[Noctris]

Make no mistake,i was called in on several 'forgotten' servers in fortune 500 companies which were only found when stuff started to fail.. thing is that small or big, setting it up properly, and more importantly: keeping it that way ( failover test etc) is more a state of mind.

My wife and i run an smb and she used to think i was paranoid. Until the day 1 disk failed in our primary, raid5 at the time, during rebuild a second one failed... And during the 8 hour window it took to get parts and start it from scratch, the backup server had 2 disks fails in a matter of hours... Poof. My redundant, and for an smb expensive, setup .. gone.. i did have most important data on an external usb disk but still lost about a week worth of data.

It's not paranoia when disks actually fail :)

Sent from my portable microwave

 

[JDCynical]

...
Until the day 1 disk failed in our primary, raid5 at the time, during rebuild a second one failed... And during the 8 hour window it took to get parts and start it from scratch, the backup server had 2 disks fails in a matter of hours... Poof. My redundant, and for an smb expensive, setup .. gone..

Finagles's Law:
"What can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worse possible time"

...which leads into the corollary of this:

'Murphy/Finagle was a fscking optimist...'

 

[Ericloewe]

Make no mistake,i was called in on several 'forgotten' servers in fortune 500 companies which were only found when stuff started to fail.. thing is that small or big, setting it up properly, and more importantly: keeping it that way ( failover test etc) is more a state of mind.

My wife and i run an smb and she used to think i was paranoid. Until the day 1 disk failed in our primary, raid5 at the time, during rebuild a second one failed... And during the 8 hour window it took to get parts and start it from scratch, the backup server had 2 disks fails in a matter of hours... Poof. My redundant, and for an smb expensive, setup .. gone.. i did have most important data on an external usb disk but still lost about a week worth of data.

It's not paranoia when disks actually fail :)

Sent from my portable microwave

3TB Seagates?

 

[Z300M]

Fingers crossed.

Just want to mention that as of the current stable release, FreeNAS support for USB 3.0 isn't that great. Other options for external storage include eSATA.

I know that FreeNAS currently does not handle on-board USB 3.0 well, but I haven't yet found any problems with my add-in StarTech USB 3.0 card.

 

[Z300M]

best of luck, and godspeed! I saw this thread and read through it but...could offer no support nor input. However if youre looking for cloud i have 27Tb of data with Crashplan Pro, yes 27Tb...unlimited storage. Now mind you most of this is archives as i set it to archive forEVER, only about 10Tb of it is current on my server, they have great support, everyone i have spoken to speaks very good english and dont sound foreign (to me it matters...) they offer a "seed" drive where you back it up to there external, ship it to them, they plug it into there datacenter and your shiz is right there rather then waiting for a month or 3 while it gets uploaded, and they offer a recovery drive where if something (like this) happens they send you a drive with your data.

They also offer 448 bit encryption, http://www.code42.com/business/

P.S i do not work for them, i like them and there support very much, and have been very helpful. I pay i think its 16$ a month for unlimited cloud backup

I see that CrashPlan claims to have Linux support, but I see no mention of FreeBSD. I realize that data is just data, but is there a convenient way to send regular incremental or differential backups automatically?

 

[pirateghost]

I see that CrashPlan claims to have Linux support, but I see no mention of FreeBSD. I realize that data is just data, but is there a convenient way to send regular incremental or differential backups automatically?

Using the crashplan plugin, it will constantly backup files as they change

 

[diedrichg]

<popcorn>
Not making light of the OP's situation but this has been a very intense geek movie drama. I was rooting for building a new box with current hardware and then the eventual disk import. Oh well, the movie had its plot twist and he went with the pro IT support. I can't wait to see the ending! </popcorn>

 

[Noctris]

<popcorn>
Not making light of the OP's situation but this has been a very intense geek movie drama. I was rooting for building a new box with current hardware and then the eventual disk import. Oh well, the movie had its plot twist and he went with the pro IT support. I can't wait to see the ending! </popcorn>

"Data of our lives - Live stream" :p

3TB Seagates?

You got the brand name right but this was WELL before the (affordable) TB era .. If I remember correctly, i had a whopping ~750GB of actual available storage on Seagate 250 GB ( could have been maxtor aswell) Ide drives running on some 3ware raid card at the time. I had another box with something like ~360 Gb for backup.

Co-workers and friends Tought i was insane ;-)

 

[cyberjock]

My friends think I'm insane for having 60TB of storage. I call them lazy for not having more storage space. ;)

 

[fracai]

Using the crashplan plugin, it will constantly backup files as they change

That's not accurate. Crashplan uses inotify, but that isn't supported on FreeBSD. Instead there's kqueue, but Crashplan would have to be updated to use this.

Because of this, Crashplan on FreeBSD/FreeNAS only backs up files when it does the full scan (by default this is once a day). You could increase the scan frequency, but this will increase wear on the disks.

If Crashplan were monitoring file events it'd be a additional reads for the changed files as they are changed. If you set the scan frequency to every hour, you'd be hitting every file every hour. If the scan even completes in that time.

 

[Noctris]

My friends think I'm insane for having 60TB of storage. I call them lazy for not having more storage space. ;)

60 tb? Not bad for an amateur [emoji14]

Sent from my portable microwave

 

[Darren Myers]

60 tb? Not bad for an amateur [emoji14]

Sent from my portable microwave

I love the new sent from mobile lol

 

[Ericloewe]

I love the new sent from mobile lol

It's funny because it really is a microwave emitter.

 

[3dmdlr]

Just a quick update. Drives were received today and evaluated. The results:
Recovery Chance*:Excellent
Media Failure Details: Disk Head Failure, Media Damage Present (slight)
Notes: Degraded heads and media damage are causing data inaccessibility.
Evaluated Cost : $1370.00

Is it a lot...yes. Could have been much more....absolutely! I have no idea if this is a justifiable amount for the work that will be done. I could very easily be getting rolled. But I don't have the knowledge so I must be OK with it.

Additionally, there is an ext hdd cost and return shipping so all in it will set me back $1500.00. I am OK with that. I was ill prepared and completely blind to the inevitable "not if but when" and I have now paid the tuition fees. The next hit will be cloud service, auto sync software, and a new out of the box ready to go minimal setup required by me NAS. I plan to use the ext hdd for my "in process" file back ups paired with an internal ssd as well (sort of a mirror approach). This will be every changing as design projects come and go. The NAS will store all the released and archived projects, as well as business related and the family related, much like what just failed only better set up and the appropriate RAID setup. The cloud will store business and family content (I think cad files might be way too big to push up and down). So I have several more grand to spend I am sure, but this will most likely help me sleep at night???

Any info on the best ix NAS and RAID setup would be greatly appreciated. Will the mini be sufficient? https://webnew.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/with RAID 10? I ahve alos been looking in to BOX or Dropbox for cloud. I really want this to all be automatic, seamless, easy, and bullet proof. Thanks for all the help, support and keeping the heat to a minimum. You may now all flame the crap out of me if need be LOL

For the people in my same situation that just stumbled on to this thread...The best advice I got was STOP freaking out, breath and calm the crap down. If your data is extremely important and you have zero capabilities, turn them off unplug them and send them off. Let the pros take over, take the hit and learn from your very costly mistakes. I did.

 

[anodos]

Just a quick update. Drives were received today and evaluated. The results:
Recovery Chance*:Excellent
Media Failure Details: Disk Head Failure, Media Damage Present (slight)
Notes: Degraded heads and media damage are causing data inaccessibility.
Evaluated Cost : $1370.00

Is it a lot...yes. Could have been much more....absolutely! I have no idea if this is a justifiable amount for the work that will be done. I could very easily be getting rolled. But I don't have the knowledge so I must be OK with it.

Additionally, there is an ext hdd cost and return shipping so all in it will set me back $1500.00. I am OK with that. I was ill prepared and completely blind to the inevitable "not if but when" and I have now paid the tuition fees. The next hit will be cloud service, auto sync software, and a new out of the box ready to go minimal setup required by me NAS. I plan to use the ext hdd for my "in process" file back ups paired with an internal ssd as well (sort of a mirror approach). This will be every changing as design projects come and go. The NAS will store all the released and archived projects, as well as business related and the family related, much like what just failed only better set up and the appropriate RAID setup. The cloud will store business and family content (I think cad files might be way too big to push up and down). So I have several more grand to spend I am sure, but this will most likely help me sleep at night???

Any info on the best ix NAS and RAID setup would be greatly appreciated. Will the mini be sufficient? https://webnew.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/with RAID 10? I ahve alos been looking in to BOX or Dropbox for cloud. I really want this to all be automatic, seamless, easy, and bullet proof. Thanks for all the help, support and keeping the heat to a minimum. You may now all flame the crap out of me if need be LOL

For the people in my same situation that just stumbled on to this thread...The best advice I got was STOP freaking out, breath and calm the crap down. If your data is extremely important and you have zero capabilities, turn them off unplug them and send them off. Let the pros take over, take the hit and learn from your very costly mistakes. I did.

Great!!!! I'm very happy to hear this update. Thanks for posting it. To me, (unless you're in a heavy multi-user environment, or have specific needs) the sweet spot is 6-disk RAIDz2.

Considering the value of your data, I might consider having two FreeNAS appliances and configure snapshots / zfs replication with a secondary level of backups (perhaps to crashplan).