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Bad Hard Drive - Restore missing files


champs777

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First of all, thank you for such an amazing product!  I love the fact that I have one virtual drive and I don't have to constantly worry about filling one hard drive and leaving the others open.  

 

Here are my system details:

Windows 7 Enterprise x64

I am not having  Stabit Drive Pool Mirror my files

128gb ssd (os drive, not in drive pool)

4tb hard drive (in drive pool)

2tb hard drive (in drive pool)

1.5tb hard drive (in drive pool)

 

 

The 1.5TB hard drive went bad.  I have tried everything to access the data on this drive and it is just dead.  I have the 4tb, 2tb, and 1.5tb drives backed up with a cloud-based solution.  I would like to restore the files that were lost from the 1.5tb but i have no idea what was actually on that specific disk. 

 

Any advice?  Thank you in advance for your help!

 

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Is the cloud backup of the pool or of the individual drives? (I'd guess the individual drives, but just making sure)

 

My drivepool is drive D.

My cloud backup points to the drive pool.  IE

-- D:\Photos

-- D:\Movies

-- etc

Since they don't point to the actual hard disk, and rather to the virtual drive, I have no real easy way to know what was stored on the drive that went bad.  In theory, it could be nothing.  I just don't know =(

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If you can get a list/index of the files in the cloud backup, then you could create a list of the files in the pool as well. And then compare the two.

 

Also, if you had duplication enable for everything, then you should be fine.

But otherwise, StableBit DrivePool does not maintain a list of files at all. 

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For performance and simplicity reasons DrivePool does not keep an index of the contents of pooled drives, so there's no DrivePool-based method to tell what was on a failed drive (if it wasn't duplicated); it's really more the sort of thing a backup/restore app should handle...

 

... and this is where I discover that my own choice of cloud-based backup does not offer an option to "restore folder XYZ but skip existing files". Well, that's really annoying. If I'm only missing X, I don't want to have to download X+Y+Z+kitchensink.

 

Hopefully your provider offers such an option. If not...is there any way you can get a list of the files in your backup to compare to a list of the remaining files in the pool?

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For performance and simplicity reasons DrivePool does not keep an index of the contents of pooled drives, so there's no DrivePool-based method to tell what was on a failed drive (if it wasn't duplicated); it's really more the sort of thing a backup/restore app should handle...

 

... and this is where I discover that my own choice of cloud-based backup does not offer an option to "restore folder XYZ but skip existing files". Well, that's really annoying. If I'm only missing X, I don't want to have to download X+Y+Z+kitchensink.

 

Hopefully your provider offers such an option. If not...is there any way you can get a list of the files in your backup to compare to a list of the remaining files in the pool?

 

I use CrashPlan.  You are exactly right.  It requires me to download the kitchensink to get back all my files.  I will try to pull a list from them and compare to what I have.  This will save me the bandwidth of downloading everything.

 

I appreciate your help time!

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This is really an interesting topic,  haven't thought about this in regards to how cloud storage works. And I just got a message from Comcast, lucky me, in my market they are going to start limiting your data usage to 300gb per month, and charge an additional $10 per 50gb's, so if you have to do a large restore, plus the costs of your ISP, online backup, at least for me are becoming less and less appealing.  

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@dbailey: yeah, Comcast... well, they have their own term for horribleness: "Comcastic". 

But in their defense, it's easier to charge more for bandwidth than it is to spend millions to actually upgrade the infrastructure. Just saying.

 

My ISP is only slightly better than them. And they have a worst name, one that they seem to try to live up to: Cox. :P

 

 

If you intend on using the Cloud a lot, or host a website on your connection, it may be worth looking into the business accounts. They tend to not have the bandwidth caps, don't block *any* ports (80 or 25 for example, which are HTTP and SMTP respectively)

 

 

 

 

Though, for the future, you could get away with dumping the output of a dir command to a text file, and do so on a schedule.

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@dbailey: yeah, Comcast... well, they have their own term for horribleness: "Comcastic". 

But in their defense, it's easier to charge more for bandwidth than it is to spend millions to actually upgrade the infrastructure. Just saying.

 

My ISP is only slightly better than them. And they have a worst name, one that they seem to try to live up to: Cox. :P

 

 

If you intend on using the Cloud a lot, or host a website on your connection, it may be worth looking into the business accounts. They tend to not have the bandwidth caps, don't block *any* ports (80 or 25 for example, which are HTTP and SMTP respectively)

 

 

 

 

Though, for the future, you could get away with dumping the output of a dir command to a text file, and do so on a schedule.

 

That is exactly what I will do.  The only other option that I can think of would be to backup the absolute paths for each of the drives.  IE

 

E:/Movies

F:/Movies

G:/Movies

 

The only problem with this is E could have all of the data and F and G might not have any.   There is no great solution due to the fact that CrashPlan downloads everything, even if the file is present.  Ohh well.  I still have the data and that is what is most important!

 

I have Charter.  No Caps (as of yet).  I also have the 100 down/5 up line.  I have never had an issue with bandwidth usage.  That even includes the month where I backed up 1.7tb of data.

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@dbailey: yeah, Comcast... well, they have their own term for horribleness: "Comcastic". 

But in their defense, it's easier to charge more for bandwidth than it is to spend millions to actually upgrade the infrastructure. Just saying.

 

My ISP is only slightly better than them. And they have a worst name, one that they seem to try to live up to: Cox. :P

 

 

If you intend on using the Cloud a lot, or host a website on your connection, it may be worth looking into the business accounts. They tend to not have the bandwidth caps, don't block *any* ports (80 or 25 for example, which are HTTP and SMTP respectively)

 

 

 

 

Though, for the future, you could get away with dumping the output of a dir command to a text file, and do so on a schedule.

naively, I assumed there would be some intelligence in the backup cloud service to know which files where missing, and having to redownload the entire lot could prove to be a pain, I say spend the extra dough on some 2.5" drives and store them in a fire/water proof box and/or safety deposit box.  

 

regarding the data caps, I was shocked to learn I had used 50gb's of data in sept.  Aug and Oct where in the 15-20GB range,  I was planning a trip to Disney, and watched one youtube video after another, but honestly, I was shocked at the 50GB still, that just seems excessive, considering I don't have any streaming services.  I'll stick with comcrap, as they have the most reliable connection (dsl/ and fiber are the only other options), I've standardized on the ceton tuner so I'm locked in to their cable service.

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That is exactly what I will do.  The only other option that I can think of would be to backup the absolute paths for each of the drives.  IE

 

E:/Movies

F:/Movies

G:/Movies

 

The only problem with this is E could have all of the data and F and G might not have any.   There is no great solution due to the fact that CrashPlan downloads everything, even if the file is present.  Ohh well.  I still have the data and that is what is most important!

 

I have Charter.  No Caps (as of yet).  I also have the 100 down/5 up line.  I have never had an issue with bandwidth usage.  That even includes the month where I backed up 1.7tb of data.

check out exacfile or file verifier plus++, these are checksum tools which allow you to export a list of your files in a folder/directory and maintain an inventory, and you can also use the output to verify files restored from the cloud are the same as the original file (compare checksum), this assumes your ran a check sum prior to losing your files. 

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check out exacfile or file verifier plus++, these are checksum tools which allow you to export a list of your files in a folder/directory and maintain an inventory, and you can also use the output to verify files restored from the cloud are the same as the original file (compare checksum), this assumes your ran a check sum prior to losing your files. 

Good idea dbailey!  Thanks for the suggestion!

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naively, I assumed there would be some intelligence in the backup cloud service to know which files where missing, and having to redownload the entire lot could prove to be a pain, I say spend the extra dough on some 2.5" drives and store them in a fire/water proof box and/or safety deposit box.  

 

regarding the data caps, I was shocked to learn I had used 50gb's of data in sept.  Aug and Oct where in the 15-20GB range,  I was planning a trip to Disney, and watched one youtube video after another, but honestly, I was shocked at the 50GB still, that just seems excessive, considering I don't have any streaming services.  I'll stick with comcrap, as they have the most reliable connection (dsl/ and fiber are the only other options), I've standardized on the ceton tuner so I'm locked in to their cable service.

Unfortunately, without your own monitoring tools, you kinda have to rely on them to be honest and truthful. :(

Because .... that's excessive. I don't care what you were doing but that doesn't sound right.  

 

As for the external, check out IOSafe. They make (expensive) external enclosures that are supposed to be fire and water proof. May be worth checking out, if you are concerned about that. 

Or if you read Home Server Show's forums, they heavily recommend the "3-2-1" method. And one of those is "off-site". So a safety deposit box may be a good idea for the really really important data.

 

check out exacfile or file verifier plus++, these are checksum tools which allow you to export a list of your files in a folder/directory and maintain an inventory, and you can also use the output to verify files restored from the cloud are the same as the original file (compare checksum), this assumes your ran a check sum prior to losing your files. 

 

ANd yeah, that's part of the issue with Cloud storage. Syncing it is fine, but what happens when you need to get it back?

Again, Home Server Show, on the forums, one of the aspects of backups that comes up is recovery. There is no point in having a backup solution who's recovery feature is completely untested. It does no good to have something backed up if you can't actually restore it (or do so "meaningfully").

I know it's too late now, but it's absolutely worth considering for the future.

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