Computer Woes

[Mike Farley]

It seemed straightforward at the time. Shortly after I got back from holiday just over three weeks ago, my PC failed. It should have been a simple repair, but it did not turn out like that. Now after three weeks of frustration, a 1.5 TB restore of my data is under way and I am hopeful that normality is about to be restored. With any luck, I can soon stop worrying about my computer and get back to taking photographs.

What I started out with was a PC which loaded its Windows operating system and applications from a 64 GB SSD (Solid State Disk). Data was held on a separate 2 TB RAID 1 disk, RAID 1 being a system whereby data is written simultaneously to two physical disks, but they appear as a single entity to the operating system. Apart from fans, hard drives are the only components in a computer with moving parts which makes them susceptible to failure. Losing a fan is one thing, having all your data disappear is altogether another. RAID 1 has built in redundancy and provides reassurance as one of the disks can fail but a complete copy of the data remains on the survivor. Crucially, I did not have a backup process in place*. I advise other people to do it and although I knew its omission was inadvisable, somehow there always seemed to be better things to do to set than set something up. As I was to find out, I had placed too much reliance on the protection provided by the RAID 1 disk and resolving that has been time consuming. Just one of the difficulties I encountered.

There will be a number of posts in this thread to document what happened. At one level, people might be interested and/or amused to learn about the sequence of events. Perhaps there will also be some learnings for others from this episode. I have already documented the first part of the saga (link below) when I reinstated the SSD and then decided to replace it with a drive of larger capacity. That's when the problems started........

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1016&p=4756&hilit=computer#p4756 (I have tried to link directly to the post, but you will need to scroll down the page to see it.)

* As it is an important topic, I'll make backups the subject of a separate post.

[davidc]

How did you lose your data if you were using RAID1? Did BOTH drives fail? That's epic bad luck

I have a similar setup in an external caddy and upon moving out here gave 1 disk to the inlaws and once my stuff finally arrives I'll recreate the array with another 2TB drive. Then if we have a fire or something I still have a backup offsite in the inlaws house. If there's sufficient interest I can give more detail on the setup I have.

I also use flickr as unlimited cloud storage too.

[Mike Farley]

How did you lose your data if you were using RAID1? Did BOTH drives fail? That's epic bad luck

I have a similar setup in an external caddy and upon moving out here gave 1 disk to the inlaws and once my stuff finally arrives I'll recreate the array with another 2TB drive. Then if we have a fire or something I still have a backup offsite in the inlaws house. If there's sufficient interest I can give more detail on the setup I have.

I also use flickr as unlimited cloud storage too.

I did not lose my data as the RAID 1 did not actually fail, but other factors came into play and making sure that it remained safe was a hassle. More of that in the next post.

Regarding flickr, my main interest is in preserving Raw files, Lightroom adjustments and any Photoshop PSDs I create. As I understand it, being primarily a photo sharing site flickr is JPEG only. Better than nothing, but I think there are better options.

It would be useful to have your observations about backups as a contribution to my forthcoming backup thread. Alternatively, you can start one and I'll add my comments there.

[davidc]

Sure, I'll pull together some of the things I've done when I get time and either start/add to a topic.

[Mike Farley]

Sure, I'll pull together some of the things I've done when I get time and either start/add to a topic.

Race yer!

It might not be until tomorrow until I get time to put my thoughts together.

[davidc]

It will not be tomorrow, nor likely this week, for me - out today/tomorrow and then all our stuff arrives on Friday. You win!

[Mike Farley]

It will not be tomorrow, nor likely this week, for me - out today/tomorrow and then all our stuff arrives on Friday. You win!

I've not posted yet. It ain't over until it's over!

[Mike Farley]

The story so far.

The SSD from which I boot my computer failed and although I had got it going again, I had taken the opportunity to replace it with a drive of a larger capacity. Unfortunately, to get the PC to boot I had had to change a setting in the motherboard's BIOS and I was concerned that this would affect the RAID 1 mirrored drive where I store my data.

My concerns proved to be founded and I was constantly having to run CHKDSK when booting and I was getting warnings of a corrupted disk. Unfortunately my backup procedure had been somewhat lax for the past two or three years, OK, non existent, and I embarked on a series of emergency backups to external hard drives. There was around 1.5 TB of data since I have retained just about every single digital shot I have ever taken. In due course I plan to go through everything and weed out the duds to free up space. Since I was concerned about the integrity of the RAID 1 drive at this point, I did not want to write any further data to it. That meant no more processing of images, not that I was shooting much as most of my time was being taken up fixing the PC.

One of the reasons for my failure to backup on a regular basis had been an assumption that unless I got a virus or there was some other mishap with the computer, keeping my data on a separate mirrored drive would be relatively safe. In the event, it turned out that a failure of another component had lead to a partial corruption of the data. Like it or not, I was going to have to wipe the data from the drive and start over. Before I did that, I wanted a more robust backup solution and since none of my existing extermnal drives had sufficient capacity to backup all my data, I was going to have to invest in something else.

Next time, I'll document what I bought and the grief it visited upon me.

[Mike Farley]

The story so far ....

A hardware failure of a separate component had resulted in the drive which contained my data, including thousands of images, to become unstable and I had no proper backup process in place. Before proceeding with a reconfiguration of my computer and rebuild of the data, I needed to put an appropriate backup facility in place.

There were three options available to me:

• One or more external hard drives
• NAS (Network Attached Storage)
• Cloud Storage

External Hard Drive

I already had a number of those, but had not implemented a solution which I used regularly. There are advantages in having a removable drive, which can be located away from the computer for added protection, but I did not want another external drive on this occasion. A 4TB drive is, though, on my wishlist.

NAS

In essence, a mini-computer with the sole task of storing data. Available in units which can take one, two, four or more drives, it has the advantage that the data is not under the control of Windows. As I had found out, problems can still occur for reasons other than disk failure.

Cloud Storage

This was not a practical proposition for backing up a large amount of data in one godue to slow upload speeds, but a worthwhile option for portfolio shots. Several companies offer limited amounts of free cloud storage, e.g. Google provides 15 GB and I also get 20 GB as part of the Adobe Photography Program.

In the end, I went with a NAS, selecting a Netgear model with a two bay drive into which I installed two 4 TB drives configured as a RAID 1 mirrored pair. Then the fun started ....

[Mike Farley]

I knew when I bought my NAS that the documentation supplied by Netgear is not very good. I made the assumption that it was all actually straightforward and that the complaints were from those who did not know what they were doing. Wrong! The manual is awful. It is long and gives an overview of each of the functions, but comes up short when it comes to the actual detail. Instructions along the lines of "enter the required value" are not very useful when it does not state what values are being sought. Plus, there are bugs. The interface is browser based and there are options to transfer files either individually or in folders, but I could never get folders to work in Firefox, only Chrome. That turns out to be the way that it has been implemented, although I eventually only found that vital bit of information when going through the firmware updates in detail.

Then there was the firmware update which was not applied correctly. As part of the initial setup process, the system automatically checks for the latest firmware update and downloads it from the Internet. My device came with 6.1.3 installed, but the latest was 6.1.8 and this was duly loaded. However, 6.1.5 had a fix which requires the NAS to be rebooted, but there was no prompt to do this and consequently it was not applied. Even worse, this fix requires a complete re-initialisation of the device which wipes all the data already stored and takes 12 hours to complete. By the time I discovered this gem, I had my data backed up. I was still within the Distance Selling cooling off period and the NAS nearly went back at that point. If I had found something more suitable, I would have returned it. Fortunately, such drastic action to reformat the disks is not required for every update and I am keeping my fingers crossed that Netgear will not pull that particular trick too often.

Netgear does provide 90 days support either via phone or live internet based chat and it needs to. My initial foray with live chat yielded erroneous information. The support person I then phoned could not answer my questions and transferred me to an engaged number. Very helpful. Then the weekend intervened when there is no support, but on the Monday I eventually found someone on live chat who was knowledgeable and able to fill in the blanks where I had not been able to find answers for myself. There is also a forum and a knowledgebase. The forum was not much use as all I could find were people having the same problems as me and not getting answers. The knowledgebase search facility does not work at all well and I found it better to use Google to find the entries I needed.

One problem which I was encountering was that not all the files were being backed up. This turned out to be due to corrupted data on my RAID 1 disk. You know, the one which had not failed, but suffered knock on effects when my SSD boot disk went belly up. CHKDSK had been running periodically and completing within a few minutes, then one day for no apparent reason it decided to run a much more extensive repair which lasted for around 12 hours. This fixed the problem.

All this took more than a week, which was several days of extreme frustration and at the end of it I was still not quite finished.