[ARSCLIST] THANK YOU ALL (re disk recovery)

["Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wish to thank everyone who replied to my plea for assistance 
regarding the historic site that lost its data.

Briefly, the drive in question was a 40G Seagate 2.5" drive that had 
been installed in a Seagate router. The file system is some variant 
(TBD) that one would find under a Linux OS.

The tech who had been called in had sent the drive to CBL in the 
Greater Toronto Area. They are a reputable, multi-national company. 
The responses overwhelmingly favoured DriveSavers as the "go-to" 
place for this type of recovery. Other honourable mentions were 
OnTrack and DiskDoctor and their affiliates.

I suggest to potential clients with audio tapes: be careful you can 
damage the tape by trying to play it -- especially on an eBay machine 
-- these disk recovery places make the same warning. I did receive 
many helpful suggestions on do-it-yourself and I've filed them all 
for future reference. This drive has severe internal mechanical 
damage. CBL indicated it was one step above DOA.

DriveSavers said they'd heard this before and sometimes (but not all 
the time) they can recover when other people say "not likely".  They 
are willing to try with a sliding scale based on percentage of data 
recovered and no fee for no recovery.

I've been added to the IT Committee and we're going to assess what is 
on the drive and what other backups we have. Finance and Membership 
both had thumb-drive backups, and we think that many of the former 
curator's research files have been printed so scanning with OCR is an 
option for them.

The critical item is the FileMakerPro database where about 3000 
records have been lost describing objects in the collection.

The curator's computer was thought to be writing to this failed 
drive, but fortunately, it was writing to its own C: drive...but not 
being backed up. Now it is.

The backup failure was a really odd one. The backup system previously 
in use created a single file backup of this mini-NAS hard drive. 
Unfortunately, the backup target USB drive had been formatted FAT32 
(this was a Windows XP system) and once the backup file grew larger 
than 4 GB POOF, the backup failed. This file size increase happened 
shortly after the system was installed in mid-2006, hence the massive 
loss of data. This is a hidden trap so beware of it. There was no 
notification of the failed backup that really warned the users.

Again many thanks for all of the warm and supportive responses and 
the helpful hints. It may be a few weeks before we know the results 
as we have to decide whether we are going to proceed and then do it. 
I was going to reply individually, but the massive outpouring of 
support has made that impossible. I hope some of you can use this as 
justification for better backup procedures. We discussed today the 
need for better backups and, to that end, I'm giving them two more 
250 GB USB/FW drives.

Summary of lessons RE-learned:
  -Don't ignore backups
  -Test backups
  -Understand the backup system and its limitations
  -Make multiple backups and keep some off-site
  -Use drive cases that have excellent heat dissipation, Avoid 
plastic drive cases
   use only heavy aluminum ones or, better yet, well-ventilated NAS 
RAID Arrays
   like Netgear or Thecus. Avoid the "My-book" type of drives.
   Heat is a major drive killer.

And, don't forget when planning, you need to plan for both equipment 
failure and catastrophic disaster recovery. I received several 
comments from people who had unrecoverable drives from Katrina. 
DriveSavers even said they were able to recover only about half the 
drives they got about seven months later, but at least they were able 
to recover half.

Thanks a lot and Happy Holidays!!!

Cheers,

Richard

Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.