Critical Drobo Alert

[Tom]

Clonezilla Live may be all you need.

It supports local, and remote disk imaging.

Thanks budy!

No problem

My main reason for avoiding hw raid is just that if you don't have an identical spare card and yours fails, you're hosed. Nothing short of thousands in data recovery (or lots of time spent trying to find a replacement card that is identical) will get your data back.

Yes and no... its the raid chip that matters.  But I see your point there... same can be said though about a NAS appliance or storage appliance, at least at the consumer level where most are not redundant parts inside.

Cheapest solution for most consumers is cloud storage, where it isn't their problem.  Next to that is a NAS appliance with own backup (burns, usb sticks, ec), and then NAS appliance with cloud backup.  Then finally is your own server with redundant parts, and backup to boot.

Actually, the raid firmware, and the hw revision also matter. Anything can change the on disk format, and I've seen plenty of references showing that some firmware upgrades on true hardware raid cards can and will change the on disk format.

If you do have one, you're better off using it as a dumb SATA controller, and using windows's Dynamic Disks, or linux's mdraid system.

Windows users rejoice... Dynamic Disks as we know them a really not used anymore in 2012.  Microsoft has adopted the models of linux raid software and now your storage options in Windows 2012 will allow for many many many fully fault tolerant and resilient OS solutions.  Took 'em long enough... now just to wait for M$ to release Windows 2012!

Heh, I was reading about the new stuff. It does look quite nice.

Clonezilla Live may be all you need.

Have you used this before on 2TB drives?  Any idea how long a clone on a regular SATA channel would take?

I haven't tried it, but partclone doesn't clone the entire disk. It clones the filesystem, skipping unused sectors.

Yep, I've never had a drive fail before a hardware RAID...

I'm not entirely certain what you had /was/ hardware raid mind you. Those onboard things are just software raid with some BIOS firmware allowing the system to boot off it. Many cheaper RAID cards are as well. You really only start seeing hw raid cards once you hit the $300 level.

I avoid fakeraid cards/chips like the plague. They are just plain useless. If you do have one, you're better off using it as a dumb SATA controller, and using windows's Dynamic Disks, or linux's mdraid system.

Ah the first one was an onboard RAID controller built into the motherboard.

The second one was an expansion card with its own power.

Either way, both failed due to RAID corrupting and NOT the drives.

I also had a situation where I borked a software RAID back in '08 but that was PEBKAC and not the controllers fault.

You /really really/ want ECC ram with software raid of any kind. As well as a UPS, and a very stable motherboard. If you're missing any one of those you'll see corruption sooner or later. (or so I've found)

I actually have plenty of corrupted files on my raid. Luckily the fs itself is fine, but I bet that's due to XFS being extremely resilient to FS damage.

When I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my home server, I got a bunch of ECC ram, and a proper server board. Any corruption I see from now on will likely be due to pebkac or an outright hardware failure (rather than just random corruption appearing over time).

Oh, and CloneZilla works nicely.  Or you could just ddrescue them?  Either or, both are free

ddrescue is mostly for rescuing data off damaged disks. If the disk is fine, and the fs isn't completely hosed, you want something like CloneZilla.

If the fs can't be properly mounted, you then want gparted-live to try and rebuild the parition table and fix the filesystems. Though Clonezilla may contain gparted, I think it might.

[Mr. Analog]

Yeah, at the time I was using all second hand RAID gear so, you get what you pay for too...

[Tom]

Yeah, at the time I was using all second hand RAID gear so, you get what you pay for too...

Hey, my RAID stuff is all second hand. I have a used IBM M1015 8 port SAS/SATA card, and I use mdraid

[Thorin]

We tested FlexRAID at work and found it had quite a performance hit when doing JBODs under the covers.  While it worked and fully supported and never lost I/O its IOPS was not very pleasing.  Not sure if you could say Transcode from a read of this source in real time.

Was that disks hooked up to the local machine, or accessed over a network?  Could the network be bottle-necking it?  I know that read/write from my Drobo FS on the network is pretty slow (my old machines only have 100mb network cards), but I'm able to read files from it and transcode them in real time.

[Melbosa]

We tested FlexRAID at work and found it had quite a performance hit when doing JBODs under the covers.  While it worked and fully supported and never lost I/O its IOPS was not very pleasing.  Not sure if you could say Transcode from a read of this source in real time.

Was that disks hooked up to the local machine, or accessed over a network?  Could the network be bottle-necking it?  I know that read/write from my Drobo FS on the network is pretty slow (my old machines only have 100mb network cards), but I'm able to read files from it and transcode them in real time.

It was local attached in machine storage on the mobo bus.  My Drobo FS is on a gigabyte network with Jumbo frames and it is blazingly fast - but it also failed

[Melbosa]

If the fs can't be properly mounted, you then want gparted-live to try and rebuild the parition table and fix the filesystems. Though Clonezilla may contain gparted, I think it might.

I need block level clone as the File System will not mount on the Drobo FS on these disks.  I need to clone each disk to a new disk and execute the built-in FSCK on the Drobo itself, but they and I highly recommend having the sources not be the ones executed against encase it wipes or breaks the File System completely.

So I guess I am at ddrescue time then for the block clone?  Or does Clonezilla give you the option to do that instead of the Partition read stuff?  Anyone?

[Mr. Analog]

Yeah, at the time I was using all second hand RAID gear so, you get what you pay for too...

Hey, my RAID stuff is all second hand. I have a used IBM M1015 8 port SAS/SATA card, and I use mdraid

*slow clap*

Good luck!

[Tom]

If the fs can't be properly mounted, you then want gparted-live to try and rebuild the parition table and fix the filesystems. Though Clonezilla may contain gparted, I think it might.

I need block level clone as the File System will not mount on the Drobo FS on these disks.  I need to clone each disk to a new disk and execute the built-in FSCK on the Drobo itself, but they and I highly recommend having the sources not be the ones executed against encase it wipes or breaks the File System completely.

So I guess I am at ddrescue time then for the block clone?  Or does Clonezilla give you the option to do that instead of the Partition read stuff?  Anyone?

Pretty much. I doubt Clonezilla supports DroboFS. And I'm not sure parted knows the format of a Drobo volume group either. TBH I can't remember what it uses. Last I heard it was some custom logical volume management setup.

[Tom]

Yeah, at the time I was using all second hand RAID gear so, you get what you pay for too...

Hey, my RAID stuff is all second hand. I have a used IBM M1015 8 port SAS/SATA card, and I use mdraid

*slow clap*

Good luck!

These are originally $300 cards I got mine for $90 including shipping. They are rock solid. Based on LSI MegaRaid 9240 cards. The only difference is IBM "differentiated" them by making the sw raid5 support an optional addon that costs $100+ for a silly little jumper stick. So far its far and away better than the old card I had. That thing didn't even have a working driver

[Thorin]

I've only used Clonezilla a couple of times, and I don't remember it doing a block-by-block clone of a disk.

[Tom]

I've only used Clonezilla a couple of times, and I don't remember it doing a block-by-block clone of a disk.

You can likely use dd/ddrescue from clonezilla. but its main function is to copy filesystems at a block level, only copying the used blocks.

[Thorin]

I used dd_rescue from the Knoppix Live distro, that worked like a charm.  I think I've written about it in another thread on here.

edit: no, that was ddrescue, not dd_rescue.

[Melbosa]

I used dd_rescue from the Knoppix Live distro, that worked like a charm.  I think I've written about it in another thread on here.

edit: no, that was ddrescue, not dd_rescue.

Yeah I quoted you in the sticky about ddrescue: http://forums.righteouswrath.com/index.php/topic,8737.0.html