Aren't you glad you used film?!

[Joanna Carter]

So, after working away for a couple of weeks, I went into my office and switched on my trusty Mac Pro with Iomega RAID external drive…

Only to find that my Images folder contained one folder (Joanna) which contained one folder (California Digital) which contained one file SantaCruzSunset.jpg.

Every single other image has completely disappeared. Well, I guess there were a few shots out of the thousands taken on digital cameras that I would rather not have lost but, at least I have all the film originals for over 500 LF shots.

I am carefully trying to examine the disks to see if anything is recoverable; otherwise, it looks like I could be in for a few long days re-scanning.

So far I am not panicking, it's amazing the sense of security a those old-fashioned sheets of film can give a girl.

[dave_whatever]

If its not actually been deleted and overwritten it should be recoverable - just don't do a lot of saving on that drive or it could overwrite some of the files.

My advice is as soon as you're back up and running go out and buy a second external HD that you sync with your main image folders, even if you only run it every month or so at least you're covered. Backup to CD/DVDs if you want to be belt and braces. Of course this is no comfort to you now but you live and learn.

[Joanna Carter]

If its not actually been deleted and overwritten it should be recoverable - just don't do a lot of saving on that drive or it could overwrite some of the files.

My advice is as soon as you're back up and running go out and buy a second external HD that you sync with your main image folders, even if you only run it every month or so at least you're covered. Backup to CD/DVDs if you want to be belt and braces. Of course this is no comfort to you now but you live and learn.

Warning, I am not having a go at you Dave, I'm just letting off steam...

Hmmm, I are a software engineer for a living. I know about this kind of thing from supporting customers who don't have backups. It's just that, when you use a RAID mirrored drive box to ensure that when one drive goes down, the other keeps going, you don't expect the operating system (or something) to carefully delete everything except one file, then copy that deleted state back to the second drive, all without somuch as a by your leave.

Just how many RAID arrays should I have?

[dave_whatever]

I've always gone for manually synced backups for this very reason But if its software that's caused it (I thought macs were supposed to "just work"?) rather than a disk error then it'll be recoverable, and being RAID at least it means you've got not one but two chances to recover it

[Joanna Carter]

I thought macs were supposed to "just work"?

Yes, I rather think it could be the firmware in the RAID box rather than the OS, so I've separated out the two drives and am going to see what happens with Disk Rescue on one of them. As you say, if I screw that up, at least I've got another to play with.

[Patrick Dixon]

RAID is not a substitute for a good backup regime.

You would be better off having a backup disk that you periodically synced to the main disk, but that was otherwise physically disconnected. Better still, have a couple and rotate them.

RAID is a scheme for configuring and managing a number of disks to act like a single disk and whilst it may give some protection against the physical failure of one or more of the disks, it can't replicate the security of a backup.

Anyway, hope you get your data back. These things often turn out to be less bad that you first fear, although I did once have one instance where it was just as bad ...

[DJ]

Another thing to consider... a lot of the so called RAID boxes on the market are utterly useless. Case in point, I bought one, a NAS box with 500gb of mirrored storage. I ended up sending it back as "not fit for purpose". It was a Maxtor.

For those who don't know, RAID 1 is mirroring, that is, the data is duplicated, so if one drive goes down, you still have all your data and can access it. Now the unit in question I bought, supposedly did RAID 1, that is, you could set it up to mirror, and indeed it would mirror. However.... that's as close to RAID 1 as it got, because it's what happened if one of those drives failed that was of concern.

If (when!) one of the drives in this unit went down, you could not access the other, not without replacing the broken drive! The unit would cease to function until the broken drive was replaced.

Worse still, to replace the drive, you had to send the whole unit back to the manufacturer, who, rather than replace the broken drive, would simply send you back an entire new unit, and bin the one containing the last copy of your data! Which kind of negates the point of having a RAID 1 unit....

If you tried to crack it open yourself, you voided the warranty, and although you could replace the drive ( if you could find a matching identical model ), the unit would not actually resilver the mirror, you could only configure it into a new RAID1 partition.

You could not remove the working disc and put it into a PC as the unit used a proprietary disc format...

So, far from this unit being a fault tolerant storage device, which is what RAID1 means, it was exactly the opposite, any failure would guarantee the loss of your data.

Of course, the manufacturer offered a "Data Recovery" service starting at £150.....

So, to anyone thinking of buying on of these devices... caveat emptor. Do your research, check out reviews of the product on the web and find out how it actually works when it goes wrong.

[Bogdan_B]

I'm not much of a computer geek but, for OS X users, '' Time Machine '' with a dedicated external hard drive should solve the problem of loosing stuff.

[joolsb]

Another vote for 'Time Machine'. It's easy to use, automatic and can use a wireless HD so there doesn't need to be any physical connection between computer and back-up device. I use TM as my primary backup, a couple of large external drives dedicated to my photo archive (one USB 2, one Firewire 800) and a bunch of small internal HDs for offline storage, any of which can be slapped into a USB caddy as and when needed. I did consider RAID but I think I might steer well clear now....

[Joanna Carter]

DJ, the unit in question is an Iomega 1.5TB e-Sata box which has performed perfectly for the last couple of years; it has two independent Seagate drives, which can be easily replaced when required. As far as I could see, Iomega has a reasonably good name and when I phoned their data recovery service, they said it was unusual for most but not all files to have disappeared. From my many years of experience, I would have expected the FAT or partition table to get scrambled, not for, what looks like, a clean surgical excision of 98% of the folders and files on the disk. At the moment I am running Data Rescue II from Prosoft - it still has 2.5 hours to go

Jools, I do use Time Machine for the main disks in the computer but, to include a very large RAID disk in the process would also require yet another very large disk, and there's no guaranteeing that the external drive that holds the Time Machine backup will not fail. My thinking was that putting my photo archive on a large external RAID mirrored array should be one of the safest mechanisms. How wrong can a girl be

[Patrick Dixon]

Could it be malicious? If someone just did 'delete *.*' in the right directory ...

[Jonathan Perkins]

Joanna,

Sorry to hear about that. You haven't been affected by the Snow Leopard data loss bug by chance (I think it is fixed in 10.6.2)? That can lead to loss of user data, but only under certain circumstances if you have logged in as a guest user. If thats the case, then google for the recovery options...

Jonathan

[Joanna Carter]

Could it be malicious? If someone just did 'delete *.*' in the right directory ...

The only other person to have a chance at accessing that computer would be my friend Helen, and since she has had problems adjusting to upgrading from the quill pen, I doubt if she even knows how to find the terminal application Anyway, it's not just all the files that are missing, it's several branches of the directory structure; not easily achieved with a simple command.

[Joanna Carter]

You haven't been affected by the Snow Leopard data loss bug by chance (I think it is fixed in 10.6.2)? That can lead to loss of user data, but only under certain circumstances if you have logged in as a guest user.

Unfortunately, I am already running 10.6.2 and everything was fine when I last used the computer two weeks ago. I always login under a regular account. Awaiting the results of the recovery scan...........

[jennym]

This is an unfortunate tale indeed. I do hope you recover your images. It is a salutory reminder to many of us of the importance of secure backup...