Advice for data backup at home.

[John K]

Just to clarify the disk in question was/is a single SATA HDD 500Gb connected via Windows 7.

Oh Lord... I am going senile...

I thought you had a failure in one of your netgear NAS drives.

This is different. PM sent

[Lyonspride]

Thanks all for the input.

 

Can anybody offer any advice with my recovery attempts?

 

Tried Testdisk and many many other pieces of recovery software and I get very intermittent results. Initially it looked like the data was there during scanning but kept stopping and then ending. Other times I get errors saying the disk in a RAW format, and now it seems to say each time there is no partition. Testdisk is not finding any partitions.

 

Any thoughts before I concede the data is beyond recovery? I'd happily pay to have the data recovered with a trial type software being the best option so I could ensure that the data is retreavable before forking out £££'s.

 

Try a program called "restoration 3.2.13", I used this years ago and it's pretty good in situations where the MFT (as previously mentioned) has become corrupt. The only thing it might do is fail to keep the correct file names (because filenames are stored in the MFT).

 

When you download it, send the file to "Virus Total" to make sure you downloaded an original version and not something dodgy. You can never be too careful....

[Tim Reid]

Sorry for taking the thread off topic...

The problem you have is with the proprietary RAID. It may be striping the data in some weird way.

Have you tried joining, posting on the Netgear forum.

http://forum1.netgear.com/

There are some super boffins on that place.

You were thinking about my recent post (thank you).

Currently I have exhausted both Netgear forums and even their incident support (a paid for service) over 1 hour on the phone with tier 2 then escalated to tier 3 for about 30 minutes. They did some very clever stuff but end result was recomending data recovery.

Currently I'm running various data recovery soft ware before giving up and paying £1,500 to £2,500 to Kroll Ontrack.

I might be selling my trailer soon!

Sob!

[Tim Reid]

Table leg,

Sorry for the cross talk. To help... I'm trying powerdatarecovery.com and disk internals.com and stellarinfo.com

If you decide to pay someone to recover your data watch out for fields data recovery, they are very easy to find on the net with lots of advertising but appear to have a very bad reputation. They quoted £500 but internet stories suggest it will increase without control.

My data is priceless (family photos) so I will be using the very best to take no risks. This will cost me greatly :-(

[TableLeg]

Thanks again all (and especially to John K)

 

Fingers crossed last ditch effort currently running recovery software.

[corsechris]

Sorry to hear of the loss. Having seen it many times when people come to me with a sorry tale, I can feel your pain. As already noted, if it isn't in two places at least, and geographically separate then it ain't a backup. You also need a restore policy to go with your backup policy, namely, a method to test the backups have actually, really genuinely worked. I would also say don't rely on cloud services for anything. Check the fine print. My company was considering cloud based services then when you look into it properly, you find that you have no recourse if they decide to go bump. No point in sitting arguing with lawyers when your data is gone and your business is dead.

Probably not news you want to hear, but stop trying to recover the data yourself, you run a real risk of making it worse, particularly with Win7 as it may suddenly decide to try and fix your disc for you. It won't. If the data really is important, you are going to have to suck it up and send it to the experts I'm afraid.

A general observation, most people only make this mistake once, as it's usually painful enough to make the lesson stick. That said, I have had one guy who didn't learn. Lost all his family photos because his missus said he wasn't allowed to spend £50 on another one of those silly drive things after I'd recovered his last failure... Any single location storage is at risk of fire, theft or flood, so to say, as well as general marketing BS that implies a product is something it isn't. Net gear NAS boxes being a prime example.

A decent company should see you right and with luck, you won't lose too much at all. You will have a bit of a nightmare putting all the data back in order when you get it back, but it'll be a good trip down memory lane by the sound of it so not all bad.

Again, sincere sympathies with this. I'm not trying to preach here, the industry tries to sell this image of utterly reliable fault free tech. Total BS.

Best of luck.

[John K]

Previous post raises extremely good points.

You may want to consider seperating your data into WIP (work in progress) and Archive

Archive is for files and data that you will no longer work on. Last years pictures for example.

move them to a different folder on the PC and then condsider a different backup media, for example DVD.

One recent real world example. We looked at a two year long engineering projects data. They had 150,000 files, we looked at the last modified date, less than 2,000 had been changed in the last 6 months...

This used to be done when spinning disk storage was very expensive. Not so much an issue now but DVDs fails in a different way to HDD.

I still always use 2 media types. Also consider storing in the native file format. Sure proprietary backup formats like zip or RAID X are funky and clever, but always consider that they might not be supported in 40 years time.

It is tempting to have a monolithic data store (big lump of data) but when you have a failure, which you will, you loose so much more.

Disadvantages of splitting it up is more management effort.

And only backup what is important to you... Its the old "what would you grab if the house was burning down".

Not to save space (storage is so cheap) but so you can keep track of what you have backed up...

[TableLeg]

Thanks guys I really appreciate the help and advice.

Sadly after running a recovery software scan for nearly 12 hours it has found nothing. No partition and no files.

I suspect that my quest to recover anything may be over.

[corsechris]

Don't give up just yet. While your windows system may not like the look of it, a data recovery company can always get something back (as long as it's not been thoroughly overwritten).

 

It's a shame you are so far away or I'd offer you an attempt at using a low-level tool I have at work - it does assume the controller still works though. I say 'so far away' as I wouldn't ask anyone to send something that is so potentially valuable to someone on a forum you don't know from Adam!.

 

The key thing is to NOT write to the drive once it starts failing - read-only efforts are essential. The fact it seems to be getting worse suggests that at least one or more of the attempts made at recovery are writing to the disc.

 

I have also used a service where the company removes the platter(s) from the drive and reads them in an 'open' hard disc mechanism. Good for when the controller is FUBAR or the heads have failed. Last time was at least 15 years ago, and they charged just over £500 for a 40G drive IIRC.

 

Don't forget, one of the key things when disposing of a disc is overwrite it with rolling patterns of data many times to make sure there is no trace....there's a good reason for that, the right tools can get almost anything back.

[TableLeg]

Thanks Chris,

I have tried about 8 different recovery programs now but I now get no data back.

The disk is not initialised in Windows and as yet I haven't found a way to make it so. It appears the disk is even being read but no contents are being found.

I think it is a lost cause and will have to be shelved for now.

Appreciate all the help offered though and I have learnt a thing or two about data recovery.

[corsechris]

OK mate - understand.

[TableLeg]

So.........having semingly lost nearly 20 years worth of family photos for anyone who may not be up to speed with computing make sure you have a backup!!!

 

Now to my next question,

 

Can you offer any advice as to the choices and best plan for choosing a back up system?

 

I would really like to double up the data content *to have 2x copies of the same files) so should I buy 2x external USB drives and have them synced or should I go for a dual storage device?

Any reccomndations on media? HDD or solid state? If HDD any particular make? I have used several drives over the years and they have been either Western Digital or Seagate. Any others worth considering?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Stuart]

I would suggest 2 x USB drives.  Depends what capacity you need and your budget.  Solid state would be my first choice but they are much dearer - you will only get c.250Mb capacity for a higher price than a 1Tb traditional drive.

 

Traditional drives come in 3 classes; Desktop, NAS and Enterprise.  Desktop usually 1 year warranty, NAS 3 years, Enterprise 5 years.  Enterprise really only necessary for full-on 24/7 critical server use.  The 'MyBook' type of plug and play USB HDDs will only have a desktop drive in them.  I like the WD Red NAS drives with a 3 year warranty (£60 from Dabs.com for a 1Tb) so would use these along with decent CIT caddies off eBay (these come with PSU and USB cable for £15 or so each).

 

Sure others will have different ideas, but that's what I would do.

 

Edited to add that I've snaffled a My Book drive from John K (cheers John) but this is for a secondary (off-site) backup.  So I'm probably not practising what I preach 'cos I'm using a NAS drive for primary backup and a desktop one for secondary.  But new the cost ain't much different these days

[John K]

I would suggest something like this...

A NAS for your primary monolithic storage (as in everything accessible in one place). And +1 for the WD Reds, I run 4x2tb of them in a Netgear NAS RAID giving 6tb of useable.

The advantage of a NAS is you have the ability to access all your media from any device on your LAN.

Split your NAS folder structure into documents, music, pics etc, then if applicable for pics and docs consider sub folders by year.

Write each year to a DVD and store at a relatives house. When they are written to DVD set the folder to read only (RO) to prevent your primary files deviating from the backup.

Then write each high level folder as in Pic, music, docs to an ext USB HDD and store somewhere seperate from the NAS

So you have primary monolithic on spinning disk so accessible all the time

Then you have a copy of each type of media on an ext HDD so anytime you can plug into a PC to access them

And finally you have an RO version of each media type by year on DVD

If you do something like this you are pretty safe from data loss and more importantly, if you lable all your media and keep a spreadsheet of what is where you might actually be able to find stuff...

A word about solid state HDD. They havent been around long enough to get a good feel for deterioration / failure periods (or MTF Mean Time between Failures). So use them for the primary storage, but not yet for long term storage.

Oh, dont forget to test your backups annually... Its not the time to find out your DVDs have deteriorated after your spining disks have FUBAR'd

Cheers...

[John K]

"should I go for a dual storage device?"

Just want to caution about this... If you go this way you might fail the first rule of backups.

Your primary and backup would be in the same place on the same technology....