RAID or Always Back Up

If you know me personally then at some point you've probably asked me about a computer. Or, more likely, how to fix it. Let me get one thing clear right off, I'm not a computer expert. I guess compared to most people I'm some sort of god but to my way of thinking I'm an amateur at best. I'm not 733t, i'm not h4x0r.

To circumvent my own occasional ineptitude and all too common hardware failure, I back up everything religiously. For some reason I've always done my own IT. At the beginning it was out of necessity. As a small business owner I just plain couldn't afford it. But as the years went on I learned more and realized I knew more that a lot of the guys I was hiring. Plus I'm a control nut and my data is my life. It's hard to let someone else mess with it.

My workstation's hard drive is cloned every night using the amazing app Super Duper. The internal video RAID is backed up as needed to an external drive. My one weakness was always my main server. I had it on a double-drive redundant RAID but it was always too large to back up easily. I would break out in cold sweats with the idea of having to increase the size of the raid or do any maintenance. I really got lucky over the years that I never lost anything. 

About 4 months ago I started getting corrupt files on my RAID. I backed up, rebuilt the RAID, basically spent 4 days trying to understand what was wrong and fix it. This is when I realized that I am not an IT professional nor do I want to be. So I decided to upgrade. After a lot of research I bought a Data Robotics DroboS. I outfitted it with 3 terrabytes to try it out. After a lot of issues (none of which were the Drobo. It was all Microsoft's issues. Why do I still run a Windows 2003 server?) everything was up and running. I felt really confident. I now had a main storage system that could be upgraded on the fly AND I had it auto backing up every night to my old RAID systems....or so I thought.

Fast forward 4 months to last weekend. I went to Vegas and upon returning to work that Monday, couldn't access my main storage. I hustled to my server room and noticed my Server was off line. No problem, I have UPS and it probably shut everything down due to a power failure over the weekend or something. I rebooted and in 5 minutes everything was back up. Except I still couldn't access my storage. Long story short, the Drobo was dead. I spent 20 mins on the phone with customer service and they decided to send me a new one. I was sure that when I popped in my drives to the new enclosure all would be right. In the mean time I would work from my backup. Everything was going as planned. My back up strategy was working!

That night I realized that I had screwed up. For some horrible reason I had stored all of my photo and video files in a folder outside of the main structure. Basically, I had a huge amount of data that wasn't being backed up. No problem, it's all still safe on my redundant Drobo drives. I just had to be patient.

The new Drobo came and I popped in my drives, fired it up and everything was great. This is where I screwed up royally. For a reason I still don't understand, I didn't immediately back up the data that wasn't backed up. Instead I started to reconfigure the drive mounting and letters through disk management. I've done it a million times and never had a problem. Until now. Half way through the renaming process everything froze. I had to reboot the machine and when it came back, Windows told me I had to format the drive. WHAT?! the drobo software was telling me everything was still there but there was no way to access it. Right away I knew what happened. Somehow the Master Boot Record got corrupted and windows had no way to see the data on the drive. My heart sank and I wanted to throw my entire rack out the window.

I have now spent the last 72 hours trying to access and restore the data that was on that drive. I refused to let the universe teach me a lesson AND win (i'm ok with the lesson part.) And I was successful. After unsuccesful attempts to rebuild the MBR I went to trying to rebuild the data from the drive. After an unsuccesful attempt I stumbled on a program called Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR) It take a LONG time, about 2 hours per 100 gigs but it worked perfectly. Found and restored every single bit of data that I hand't backed up.

I figure I have another solid day of rebuilding the Drobo, restoring from the backups and then reconfiguring it all back to how it was WITH a new set of back up rules in place. phew....it's been a long weekend.