Update on the data recovery frontline. A bit off topic, but I gotta vent, and I already dropped some info on what has happened in here before.
After three weeks of total radio silence, they informed me that they managed to associate the file and folder structure with the actual data. They gave me a file list and all, also had their technician show me around the state of things on his work system via screen sharing. He gave me some samples, opened random files and everything appears to be good. No corrupt data.
Since then I've been waiting for them to receive an external hard disk from their supplier that is large enough to take all the files to be recovered (12 TB) because they only had max 4 TB drives lying around and would have had to split them up.
Now FINALLY after yet more radio silence - with some emails from me staying completely unanswered -, they sent a message on thursday last week claiming they meanwhile got the disk and the copying process was halfway done, and on monday they shipped the hard drives. With some luck they'll arrive tomorrow, otherwise early next week - three and a half months after I originally lost access.
I will be so relieved when this crap is over...
Piss poor communication but in the end what counts is that I get my files back.
This lesson in "keep a fucking backup if your files are important to you" will have cost me about €4100. (Buying the hardware for backups NOT included - only the recovery service.)
Do not repeat my mistake, guys. Buying the extra hardware to keep just one more simple copy of your stuff is much cheaper than paying a data recovery company. Not counting the horrible feeling of not knowing if you can even get your files back, especially over such a long time span. I had luck in that I knew the data couldn't be corrupt or at least could be repaired because I had a RAID system and nothing was overwritten, but if a simple standalone hard drive fails, chances are some data will be irrecoverably lost. Save yourself the torture!
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During all this waiting, I've been working on setting up all the new hard- and software I've bought to have a solid backup concept. I've also bought yet more hardware for backups since my last update.
Backup strategy has been expanded to 3-2-1 (three copies total, two onsite and one offsite).
Also now covers backups of my machines (two notebooks, two desktops, one server), totalling over 9 TB if all the internal drives were 100% full. Previously I had some external hard drives where the notebooks and one of the desktops could write a backup to, although the desktop never was fully backed up (only system drive) and in general I was too lazy to plug the disk in regularly for all of them.
Main copy of my file archive will sit on the new Synology DS1819+ which I bought first. Filled it with eight 4 TB Seagate IronWolf drives in RAID 5 for 28 TB of effective capacity.
My existing file archive is around 12 TB and in the meantime I've gathered another 4 TB worth of data, so I'll be starting off with 12 TB remaining capacity once I'm done reintegrating the recovered files. I expect this will last me for at least 4-5 more years when I plan to preemptively replace the drives in this NAS anyway. With 4 TB over just a couple months this may sound overly optimistic, but this was an exception. Usually, I stay well below the 200 GB/month average I'd have to sustain to fill this up within five years.
I went from RAID 6 down to RAID 5 because I am now distributing the risk. An array crash before rebuild is done is no longer catastrophic as I still have two backups. Say one drive dies in the main NAS. The files are still accessible, but vulnerable. Any more drives failing loses all data in the array. But the level two copy residing on the other NAS is at most a week old, and it should be very rare that the volume of files changed since would be larger than a few hundred gigabytes. So basically the other drives only need to survive maybe one or two more hours until the changes since the last backup are copied. Even in the horrible case that another drive dies within that little time frame, I lose a week worth of data max.
Onsite backup (level two) is split on two devices.
My old 8-bay NAS is half filled with 8 TB shucked WD white labels (HGST Ultrastar enterprise grade drives according to R/N on them) with no parity, and hold the level two backup of the file archive. This NAS will only start up once a week for a backup update, so the drives shouldn't clock many power-on hours.
And then for the machine backups I bought a small 2-bay NAS. That NAS is also scheduled to boot once per week, and shuts down automatically after a certain amount of time has passed without any activity.
Offsite backup (level three) goes on a bunch of crappy SMR external hard drives, some in an enclosure, some without - I have HDD docks. Everything encrypted so I could also hand these to someone else to keep for me in theory. I plan to update these once a month, more rarely if there were no significant changes, and occasionally bringing them in earlier for an update if important data came in recently. Will set up a recurring calendar event so all my devices will keep nagging me so I don't forget.
All the drives go into a padded Pelican case (the bare drives wrapped in antistatic foil) and said case will be stored in the cellar. I chose Pelican not just for the padding but also for the waterproof aspect - that cellar once got flooded because of a broken pipe...
Due to the construction conditions here it should be nearly impossible that both the flat and the cellar are in some way destroyed at the same time, so this way should be just as good as storing the case in an actual remote location.
The only vulnerable time frame is when I connect the level three backups for updating, then all the data is in the same location. For starters I plan to only run the backups while me or someone else is home. Later down the road I'll go with two offsite backups and alternating the set of disks brought into the flat to update.
Some in-progress pics...
Top: Main archive, bottom: level two backup
Level two machine backups
Level three offsite backups in Pelican 1500 case. Nameplate is 3D printed with two colors.
