July is the data loss month

Earlier this month towards the end of June I lost my main drive on the desktop.

It took me 2-3 days to figure out that it is not possible to boot the drive. To avoid further harm on drive I used my Second drive to boot my Windows 8.1. That was a stupid move. The windows was working again but I had lost all data on my second drive. I was certain that since I had two cloud backup providers thing would be ok. Unfortunately Backblaze which had all data except for “Program files”which it does not back up , I had no way to download it. There restore software does not work. Only way is to ship the data over.

Crashplan was much better. The application can restore and they have a Hong Kong location which is close. However it will take 3 weeks. I am now at last week of recovery. The other problem is that Crashplan backs up very slow so I did not have all the data. I will get bits and pieces.

I have the damaged internal HDD which I am trying to power on with external connector. It doesn’t seem to work. I will need to get a drive bay and try again as it did have an old copy of my data drive.

While I was in Tokyo last week, I managed to get a good deal on Samsung 3d SSD 1TB as well as Western Digital 6TB Red. I have hooked them up. I will be using the 6TB to copy all the recovered data from different sources. Then I need to compare and get the latest version out for restore. The SSD will replace my original Data drive.

If the above was not enough one of my main Servers had 2 out of 3 drives fail (hardware fault) earlier this week. Since I was travelling I could not investigate. Despair!

All hope was not lost.

This is a 3 disk Raid5 with mdadm software raid and last night I started to investigate. I was able to boot to rescue mode and found that atleast 2 out of 3 drives can be read by the OS. Only one was completely unreadable. I asked the Hosting provider to replace only one of the two faulty drives (the unreadable one) for now so I can reassemble the Raid5 and start recovery. The recovery started successfully after a couple of failed attempts with mdadm. With forced mode I was able to reassemble the Raid. cat /proc/mdstat shows that recovery is in progress.

It has been over 12 hours now. I believe another 3 hours should complete the recovery and I can mount the Raid disk to check. However I will not be using the current volume yet at all. The faulty drive may fail further and data loss can occur.

Now the plan is to replace the 3rd drive once Raid has completed recovery. The recovery will start again with the 3rd new drive. I should be able to get the complete system up in another 24 hours. Then I will start a new Server in Raid1 with enough space to pump data across to the new Server. I will need to download all of the 2.5TB of data from the new host as my first backup and then setup Rsync.

In the meanwhile, I hope I can get all my development environment, my extremely bleeding edge modded Skyrim back on my desktop T_T

What a month!