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Forum Discussion
Chances of Recovery
Hoping to (hopefully) find some sliver of light at the end of what appears to be a very dark tunnel at this time. It appears that I have lost two of the four drives (in a very short time period) ...
Hey rn_enthusiast,
For starters, thank you very much for the help and insight to hopefully resolving this problem.
Just some follow up then a couple questions.
Disk 3 was removed from the array in July with some guidance from other uses on this forum to hopefully jump start it back to life. The suggestion was made, to hopefully make this fully redundant again, to start searching for replacement/upgrade options. I did not realize that it never fully reinitialized. In the process of determining what I wanted for a replacement, we get to where we are now unfortunately.
In the future, I would guess your suggestion would be to not pull a drive that is potentially, or likely from what it looked like, failing to avoid a chance of breaking the array?
Also, I am getting an external backup solution (some sort of external USB) for the highly sensitive files in the array. Do you have one here that you would recommend brand or size wise? I was looking at a WD Essentials as I have always used their internal drives in personal builds in the past and never had any major issues.
So a couple questions on trying to recovery what is left.
What is the process of going through NetGear for paid support to clone Disk 4 (and/or Disk 3 for that matter) and do you know a rough idea of cost on this process? (I know you were a former employee so its just a question, nothing I would hold you to. Just looking for a rough idea.)
Is the cloning process something I could do at home myself? If yes, would that be a faster and cheaper first attempt to fixing the array? Also, is there any more damage that can be caused if I made an initial attempt at home and then had to revert to NetGear?
When attempting to clone Disk 4 (and or Disk 3) either at home or with NetGear, can the drive size be upgraded at that time? The initial reason I came here was to look into expanding the size of the array. Currently they are 4tb drives, could I clone one or both of them to larger drives and restart the array with more size? The ultimate plan is to upgrade the whole array but I was cautioned away from it in July. The status of Disk 3 scared away a couple users in fear that another drive in the array may be close to end of life. Looks like they were right.
If upgrading in HDD size is not the case, would I need to buy a 4tb drive that "matches" what is currently in the array or would anything of similar size be acceptable to clone to regardless of brand or model?
As far as alerts go, apparently it doesn't want to play well with gmail or I am missing something simple. I tried getting it set up with my account so I can receive them and Google won't allow the simple one button sign in, even after I turned on the ability to use less secure apps. Attempting to manually enter the email credentials doesn't help either as it throws an SMTP error when sending a test message.
Again, thank you for any and all insight into this.
Chris
Hi Chappy316
As for external USBs, I have had WD elements USB drives attached to my NAS for a while with no problems. StephenB and Sandshark might know more about USB compatibility in general but I have had good success with WD elements 2TB and 4TB, personally.
The cost of the data recovery contract, I think was something in the the region of $100-$150 but it has been a good few years since I worked there. More extensive data recovery work could require extra cost from what I remember. Maybe StephenB knows the price better? In any case, it will be far cheaper than any regular data recovery service.
As for doing it yourself, you theoretically can. Netgear aren't doing anything magical here but it requires a bit of knowledge. The other advantages of using Netgear to do it, would be that they can use the NAS itself for the cloning process. Makes it easier for you. One would need to examine the raid super blocks to ensure that you are cloning and using the correct disk to re-assemble the raid. Based on logs, it looks like disk 4 is the one we need to use and clone for the raid assembly but examination of the raid super-block would still be prudent. Next will be to monitor the cloning process and assess whether the clone was fully successful and then manually assemble the raid array using disk 1, 2 and the cloned disk 4.
The issue is that it requires some knowledge and/or experience to do this. There are pitfalls, as cloning in the wrong direction or incorrect re-assembling the raid, can lead to total data loss. In any circumstance, it would imagine that you would need Netgear to at least help assemble the raid so having then also start the cloning process (which takes many hours to finish) would probably make sense as I don't imagine that would add a lot to the cost of the work + it makes it safer for you. The replacement drive and can be a drive of same size or larger. I am 99% sure of this. Either should do fine but checking with Netgear is the best thing here but I don't imagine the clone process will cause any issues using a larger target drive.
As for the alerts, I don't use gmail myself (due to privacy stance and tinfoil hats and so on :) ). But the NAS email service is like a forwarding agent that essentially log in into your gmail account and send the mail to yourself. This is something I think gmail might have blocked by default. I am sure it is possible to get working and the two guys that I tagged earlier in the post probably knows more about this, than I do. I will let them chime in on that.
Cheers
rn_enthusiast wrote:As for doing it yourself, you theoretically can. Netgear aren't doing anything magical here but it requires a bit of knowledge. The other advantages of using Netgear to do it, would be that they can use the NAS itself for the cloning process. Makes it easier for you. One would need to examine the raid super blocks to ensure that you are cloning and using the correct disk to re-assemble the raid. Based on logs, it looks like disk 4 is the one we need to use and clone for the raid assembly but examination of the raid super-block would still be prudent. Next will be to monitor the cloning process and assess whether the clone was fully successful and then manually assemble the raid array using disk 1, 2 and the cloned disk 4.
The issue is that it requires some knowledge and/or experience to do this. There are pitfalls, as cloning in the wrong direction or incorrect re-assembling the raid, can lead to total data loss. In any circumstance, it would imagine that you would need Netgear to at least help assemble the raid so having then also start the cloning process (which takes many hours to finish) would probably make sense as I don't imagine that would add a lot to the cost of the work + it makes it safer for you. The replacement drive and can be a drive of same size or larger. I am 99% sure of this. Either should do fine but checking with Netgear is the best thing here but I don't imagine the clone process will cause any issues using a larger target drive.
This may sound a little scary but its all a dice roll to an extent, right? I have a friend who I very much trust with things of this nature so I picked his brain. He seems fully confident that we can clone the drive. I would rather make an attempt here first versus paying the $200 consult fee to find out we can't do anything through NetGear. From the browsing I have done, it appears its a $200 consult/first hour charge and then $150 an hour after that. This information was gathered from their Q&A pages as well are my (less than successful) chat with support last night.
He does have a couple things he wanted me to ask/verify with the help I have received here.
1) He knows we will have to do a bit-by-bit clone but wanted to make sure we can use an equal size or larger drive. You aren't the only one that is nearly 100% certain that we can do that. The existing drive is 4tb so I will need a fresh 4tb or larger drive to clone to. Ideally we want to increase the size of the array so I will be looking to get a larger drive as long as we can go that route. Regardless, they will all be upgraded but obviously recovery is the first priority, upgrading is second.
2) Should we power down the rest of the array to save power up time and stress on the drives that are still good? I don't want to remove or power down anything that I don't have to for fear of decreasing the chances of recovery that we are already limited to.
3) If we an manage to clone Disk 4 successfully, will it be as simple as remounting the drive in the array? Ideally yes but I feel like that may not be the case from the sounds of it. What do you mean when you say we would need to manually assemble the array?
4) Should I consider getting two replacement drives and attempt to clone Disk 3 as well to maximize our chances of recovery? Given that Disk 3 is in much worse shape, is that even a potential option? I will ultimately need two drives but is cloning the more damaged disk even an option?
Thanks again everyone! You have all been more than helpful at this point.
Chappy316 wrote:1) He knows we will have to do a bit-by-bit clone but wanted to make sure we can use an equal size or larger drive.
Yes.
Chappy316 wrote:
2) Should we power down the rest of the array to save power up time and stress on the drives that are still good?
It's reasonable to do that now.
Chappy316 wrote:
3) If we an manage to clone Disk 4 successfully, will it be as simple as remounting the drive in the array? What do you mean when you say we would need to manually assemble the array?
You will begin by mounting the drive with the NAS powered down. Then power up. But the array will probably be out of sync (there will be changes to the volume that were never written to disk 4). In that case there would be some steps with mdadm and btrfs to force the array to mount. Likely there will be some file corruption/loss too. So you would need to enable ssh, and manually run some commands to do that.
Chappy316 wrote:
4) Should I consider getting two replacement drives and attempt to clone Disk 3 as well to maximize our chances of recovery? Given that Disk 3 is in much worse shape, is that even a potential option? I will ultimately need two drives but is cloning the more damaged disk even an option?
I'd get two replacement drives. But I wouldn't attempt to clone disk 3. If you are successful, you will still have a degraded array. You can hot-insert a blank disk 3, in order to recover from that part. Though I'd urge you to make a backup to external storage before you do that.
StephenB wrote:You will begin by mounting the drive with the NAS powered down. Then power up. But the array will probably be out of sync (there will be changes to the volume that were never written to disk 4. In that case there would be some steps with mdadm and btrfs to force the array to mount. Likely there will be some file corruption/loss too. So you would need to enable ssh, and manually run some commands to do that.
I'd get two replacement drives. But I wouldn't attempt to clone disk 3. If you are successful, you will still have a degraded array. You can hot-insert a blank disk 3, in order to recover from that part. Though I'd urge you to make a backup to external storage before you do that.
This is where you lose me. I know enough to be dangerous with consumer level computing. When it comes to command line, what I would call higher level work, I get lost fast. I will pass this information on to him and see what his thoughts on the process are. This is much more of his day to day than it is mine. Now, this makes cloning the drive sound like the easy part. Haha!
So I am looking at picking up two new drives, if not four to ultimately get the array to where I want it to be. As well as an external to move files to in the interim. One step closer. Still keeping those fingers crossed.
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