Well, it's official, I just lost most of my work About half a year ago I bought a hardware RAID solution with two hot-swappable drives, thinking that my worrying days were over. Instead the very solution that was supposed to protect my files ended up destroying them. It started when one of the drives failed, with a "bad block" error. I googled it and found it would resolve it self with a zero-out format. After formatting the drive I inserted it into the RAID casing and to my horror I see it starting to copy the empty drive to the drive with my files. I try to abort it but it was too late. Desperate I tried using data recovery software only to find that it is total bs, nothing was retrieved.
So, a word of advice, stay clear of RAID and just back up your files on two drives your self. And never completely trust any hardware, however much it's supposed to "protect" your files.
P.s. Please refrain from any hindsight advice, I'm depressed enough as it is. Thanks.
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This following is not hindsight advice for you, but a suggestion to others who don't want what has happened to you, to happen to them. Otherwise, there's be no point in your post, if it's not a learning experience for all.....I would say most feel your pain and loss!
But you should also have been doing a weekly (if not daily) backup to external drive, or better, tape, ideally using software designed for the purpose. If not, then a manual copy (although this allows little of no version control).
Your real mistake was in how you handled things when the drive failed. You should have left the failed drive out, and ran on the good one with the express purpose of backing up the whole system. Then when it's backed up, you start recovering. I think your data was lost because you tried to rebuild the 'wrong way around'...sometimes the 'good' disk needs to be reset in the raid bios to be the master before recovering.
I can never understand why people (generally) are so trusting of goods that are typically now made down to a cost level, rather than up to a quality level.
As for me, I have raid on the server, and backups weekly, negs for all projects are stored on dvd for short term recovery, should something happen. Thats a total of 5 copies at any one time. (Yeah, and I'm not paranoid!)