Played with fire... got burnt

folks my 5TB usb hdd (i know i know i dun goofed) with all 1150 movies, family photos, software backup etc took a 2 inch fall and is dead as a doornail. confirmed by removing drive and testing. i have a secondary cold storage backup for family photos but i havent synchronized since november and everything else is lost.
ive already slapped my hand over it. im not looking for sympathy.
i was saving up for a qnap at the recommendation of a coworker but ive decided to jump ahead and get something going before another of my drives dies.
im curious about doing a low cost homebrew server for home running raid so i never suffer the consequences again. ive never built a home data server before and could use some advice on where to start reading/looking.
plz be nice

also is qnap a meme?

try freezing it

for sure. i put it in the freezer an hour ago. will popit out in a few hours and attempt some recovery. been doing things like this for a while
looking more for advice on home data server suggestions for something low cost and homebrew

> im curious about doing a low cost homebrew server for home running raid so i never suffer the consequences again
Good thing you're willing to learn, there are faggots that don't.

No, but their machines are relatively pricey overall. Yea, you pay to an extent for pretty long term support with software, but a major Linux distro will give you longer term support with more software... just not all in a web interface [there are some, but they're not as complete]. But shit is so simple, you may not need it.

The price difference isn't small at all for many of these machines. 2 drives in a fas box or even more 4 never mind 8 drives will cost you quite a lot of money extra over DIY with low power parts.

I too have lost a hard disk drive recently.

Is there anything I can do to attempt file recovery if it won't even boot? Like if I connect it to my PC I can't even boot into Windows even though Windows is on a completely different drive (SSD)

thanks
thoughts on a distro to start with?

Doesn't matter very much. Fedora? Debian? SUSE? Hell, use Gentoo if you want.

The things you ultimately want - samba, ftp, http or whatever - aren't really distro specific.

thanks
ill plug away at it

What a coincidence. I just came to Sup Forums to whine how I fucked up the LUKS header of my drive and lost 3TB of data (essentially everything I've hoarded in the last 10 years). Feels bad man.

sorry for your loss

Happened to me with a 500GB external too. Never again. Internal HDD is the way to go for massive storage, specially if you don't have a backup somewhere, less prone to have accidents.

Even internal needs redundancy, unless your data is no problem to loose.

Just because it sounded like "external is bad, internal solves this". No, you need more than that.

Wouldn't something like FreeNAS be better than a normal desktop os? I figured FreeNAS would be better for power consumption or something.

Go with Synology, solid BSD base, and quick security updates.

Start with Testdisk. Would be wise to rtfm prior to pressing Enter on any write options....

It's a BSD with a Web UI that makes certain configuration more... Web UI based. Linux also has those.

Could be easier depending on where you're coming from and what you want to do, but it's not really related to power consumption.

PS: FreeNAS may not support some of the ARM low power hardware which quite a few people build lower drive count NAS from.

In that sense, it may be power relevant by proxy of hardware support.

YMMV if you want x86 anyhow, most of x86 is supported.

Find a cracked version of easeus data recovery, helped me recover 99 of the data from a crashed drive

I never implied otherwise, I was referring exclusively to the fact that it is likely you will drop your external drive eventually, meanwhile you normally are not moving around your internal drives.
Obviously your data isn't really safe at all without redundancy, it is always a time bomb.
Ideally a backup on a disconnected drive somewhere, because even with RAID 1 someday you have a power surge and you might be fucked.

You should be glad you have been forcefully freed. Data clutter/hoarding is a mental disorder.

Yea, use a Linux live USB like sysrescuecd and check what the drive does.

Maybe you lost barely any files from Linux' point of view.

Or maybe your filesystem is gone and you can run photorec to get some files off it with file forensics.

You DO want at least one more drive of equal size to be able to clone the defective drive (may sidestep further failures) and recovery (can't write to the drive you're recovering FROM without massive risk of wrecking more).

Yea, RAID 1 isn't much at all. Better do RAID 6 plus full offline copy.

Maybe mirrored RAID 6 and then full offline copy if it's something you'd probably cry over loosing (IDK, anything from legal documents or family photos to work stuff that costs you weeks or months full time if lost), or the equivalent on distributed storage (so, 3+2 erasure code pools, twice replicated, plus maybe one offline or full version control in a different format a few years back).

The unpleasant aspect of this is that of course it costs more than one drive, but it's still pretty cheap for how much you can store with a few hundred dollars.

Cheap pc. Cheap proc and ram, small ssd for boot. Add disks. I personally prefer win 10 at this point because you can run apps or vms on it but just use storage spaces for the redundant disks. No raid to setup and just works. That or build a small server and use freenas or something. None of this requires massive hardware investments. That being said a small Nas is not that expensive. O like storage spaces because it is portable to other windows boxes, so your server dies just pull the disks and attach them to another windows machine.

If you do not want any security of your data beyond a single drive, that is cheap, sure.

Can be done with just a ODroid HC1/2 or RPI3 or Rock64 or whatever - machines that cost less than $100 with all accessories other than the drive and use very little power.

> windows
Never for NAS.

I spilled orange juice on a laptop today, and it no longer turns on anymore. What's the chances that I can fix this. I've already stripped the laptop apart, removed battery, SSD and various other things that were in the way of the motherboard.

Managed to get down to the motherboard which was also wet (and worse, sticky). Re-assembled this after applying toilet paper to soak up any excess orange juice. Went to plug in the battery, and didn't see the battery light come on.

Then when I powered it on, no response again. If I were to buy alchohol and completely strip it down and disassemble it all, would that work? Anyone with any experience? What would a laptop repair store be able to do?

IDK, but the chances that your drive isn't dead are good at this point.

> What would a laptop repair store be able to do?
Chances are usually pretty bad.

A random store usually doesn't have the skills (/ a viable business in retaining the skills and parts) to replace more than a defective battery, fan or HDD (these are parts that at least are standard and work in a good number of laptops, typically not specialty pieces - too much other ones are).

I'm a normie when it comes to this stuff, but I've installed and used Debian before. Is FreeNAS easier to set up than Debian or is it about equal?

>5TB
>1150 movies
>5000/1150 = 4.3 GB/movie
God is punishing you for downloading yify garbage.

Yeah not so much worried about the SSD since I didn't have anything of value on it. But if the whole thing is fucked then, well that's that I guess.

You'll baulk at this but - dishwasher.
I used to wash cards I dug out of old pcs in my dishwasher.
As long as the battery (or ANY) power source is removed - including cmos battery and as long as it has NO moving pates or is enclosed and as long as it's COMPLETELY DRY before reassembly - it can't really hurt, can it?

I've never washed a hdd but mobos and network cards have come out gleaming , smelling lemon fresh and working on 1st boot.

Yeah I'll probably do this to be honest, as a last resort sort of thing after I've got a replacement. Did you have to remove the capacitors and such?

Well, it could be the battery or PSU or something simple.

But prepare for a full replacement. It's just the more likely scenario with how cheap replacements are and how expensive service tends to be.

I'm talking a full strip down here in case you're wondering, not just chucking your laptop on the sink or dishwasher.
Also I'd run it with no tablet and on NOT hot.

qnap, synology, etc are trash, unless you enjoy having your server break monthly and being forced to give your money to shitty consumer electronics companies with "support" staff that can't tell the difference between a phone line and ethernet cable.

"true" RAID technology (both on mobo and add-in cards) is worse than useless because of the write hole, an unpreventable and unrecoverable error which will destroy your fancy RAID1/5/6 array with a single power failure. you can gamble that a battery backup will provide you enough time to finish all your queued writes, but if you do that then you deserve to lose all your data.

buy a xeon, at least 8GB ECC ram, at least two disks, and throw together a fileserver using zfs mirrored vdevs on your choice of BSD. zfs is the only filesystem which has actually proven to be resilient in decades of real world use. if you use non-ECC RAM or fewer than two mirrored disks, you deserve to lose all your data.

or be lazy like me and use zfs on ubuntu; if you're going with the linux route, though, you can consider btrfs, which is essentially nu-zfs written in the modern era. however, it is almost completely unproven, and has a number of crippling data loss bugs if you use anything beyond the most basic single-disk setup. in particular, if you use btrfs' raid5 or raid6 then you deserve to lose all your data.

tl;dr get ECC RAM and use zfs RAID 1, 01, or 10. if you do anything else then you deserve to lose all your data.

Wouldn't think so. If they're drained after cmos battery removal there's no charge to worry about.
Not an electrical engineer tho so don't quote me.

did you put it with rice too?

What is in the Linux realm? I use unRaid for my NAS and FreeNAS before that. I tinkered with Nas4Free and OpenMediaVault but unRaid eeked out as the best solution because of the Community Apps module and allowing VM/Docker images easily.

>qnap, synology, etc are trash, unless you enjoy having your server break monthly
That's not actually an issue. They are pretty stable.

> the write hole, an unpreventable and unrecoverable error which will destroy your fancy RAID1/5/6 array with a single power failure
Absolutely bogus. You may loose the one unwritten chunk, the rest of the array should be safe unless you have really terrible hardware RAID. That said, I don't suggest you use hardware RAID, Linux sw RAID is really basically the industry standard by now because it's just better overall.

> buy a xeon, at least 8GB ECC ram
ZFS requires monster machines and yet scales like shit as you add more drives. It is far from a no brainer.

about 2.5tb were movies. another 1tb was family photos and some software.
some movies were yify yeah
i have kids so a lot were for them where i didn't care about quality. some of the movies i had were also older or shorter or hard to find above dvd quality. i have a wide range of taste so the variety in size was endless.
many of the movies were high quality bluray rips with surround for a more cinematic experience.
then i guess if i deserve punishment for all that then ill take it.

I'm planning to keep a couple 8tb HDDs as my backup solution, one in my PC & one in my car.

Figure I'll keep a partitioned clone of my C: & F: (files/documents) drives, with the rest of it either a manual dumping ground or some backup software restorepoint etc bullshit. Will keep them encrypted since lol car-drive could be stolen.

Good plan if I'm not a fan of the cloud-backup meme?

>inb4 le gold drive REEEE
I've got cash to burn & I'm fucking tired of HDDs failing, faggot.

you can get a diskless single bay nas for around a hundred bucks and just add a drive to it. or if small form factor isn't a necessity then get a used c2d or better machine for around sixty to eighty bucks and run nas4free or some shit on it

yep
my process is to wrap the drive in paper towel, put some rice in a ziploc and seal it up with the least amount of air, then bag it again, then dump in the deep freezer for a few hours. ive had many recoveries work with this method.
i actually just tried it out after about 4 hours in the deepfreezer and it just sounds like its snoring. safe to say shes dead for good. damn

>Good plan
No. You're doing single non-redundant drives that will be ALL difficult to keep updated and require effort on your behalf ever time to connect them and update them.

I'd strongly suggest doing a NAS with RAID as primary backup that will automatically be updated. At most do the occasional archival copy of that RAID'ed NAS backup itself manually.

>about 2.5tb were movies
even worse

2500/1150 that's an average of just 2.17GB per movie. Disgusting bitrate. Similar to netflix 480p.

this the shittiest post i've read all day. fuck off retard

lol sorry youre assblasted that my kids dont need 4k disney or that an 8gb bluray copy of children of men doesnt meet your quality standards.
some of the digital movies i had were from prebluray era and i hadnt gotten around to getting better quality rips. relax dude. rest assured all those bad quality movies are gone forever now so you can sleep soundly

Do not use windows
Do not use NTFS
Do not go without a backup
Do not encrypt with bitlocker
I've seen some shit in how bitlocker works and not only is it dangerous to data integrity but also poor in performance.

Do use ZFS
Do use BTRFS
Do use XFS
Do use LUKS or dmcrypt
Do test your backups regularly

Microsoft has no fucking idea what they're doing in the data integrity space.

See, you're just signing me up for buying & figuring out an NAS RAID setup on top of the manual archival copy.
Not to mention dealing with automated backup software. That shit's pure cancer.

One in my comp I'll keep updated every few days rather than relying on automated garbage to actually do its job. It's for sudden failures & gets swapped out with the car-drive every few months.
Car drive is for longer-term corruption recovery or if the goddamn building burns down.

Why do I need more than this?

Cars vibrate.

>See, you're just signing me up for buying & figuring out an NAS RAID setup on top of the manual archival copy.
You can automate all if you want.

Either way, even the NAS RAID5/6 saves tremendous amounts of time if you want any halfway complete mirror of the files you've been accumulating "recently" rather than once in years.

> Not to mention dealing with automated backup software. That shit's pure cancer.
The opposite. Manually doing backups is cancer. People will forget a folder, turn the computer off before it's complete, "woops" overwrite the main copy with the backup rather than the other way around, or just not do it for months.

And more. Plus it's getting even more annoying if you want a sane method of doing incremental / differential backups so you have a "history" of backups against accidental deletes / corruptions on the primary copy. Or if you even just want checksums to check if backup a or backup b is the one that is probably corrupted.

And a lot more.

>And more. Plus it's getting even more annoying if you want a sane method of doing incremental / differential backups so you have a "history" of backups against accidental deletes / corruptions on the primary copy. Or if you even just want checksums to check if backup a or backup b is the one that is probably corrupted.

ZFS, lad.
You know not this comfy.

Hm. That they do- more than vibrate in fact, they bump. The cumulative effect of keeping something in there for months hadn't crossed my mind, worth more looking into at least.

Not interested in incremental/differential backups beyond the bare minimum.
I can live through data loss, have done so when backups failed, so mitigation doesn't have to be 100%.
And the time & effort involved in managing even an automated system (troubleshooting it) is something I'm not interested in sacrificing.
Especially the effort, I've got no patience for software nowadays.
Would rather just lose some of my shitty data.

Trying to sign up for the catastrophic failure bronze plan, not the premium data protection platinum plan.

That is kinda what I do;

1. Daily backup (automatic); 5 Client PCs backed up by the server (3 primary clients, 2 used sparingly). Backups are retained for 1 yr. Server + Nas(s) + Network gear connected to UPS.

2. Monthly Backup (or depending on how much new data is added); All Server data incremental backed up to Raid 5 Zyzel Nas. (kept shutdown when not used)

3. 2nd Archived backup; Films/Music backed up to another Zyzel nas (Kept shutdown)

4. USB External (kept shutdown); Server System Image + Client Backups backup. 2nd Archived copy of X Rated & E-book Collections.

5. Server's data drives are in Raid 5 (4x3TB) and Raid 1 (2x2TB) configuration. OS/Client Backups/few videos are on 1TB single drive.

Send it to a recovery specialist before you destroy it further, pay out your ass, and never be this stupid again.

Also, NAS is good but you should have an offsite backup as well, like encrypted cloud storage.