A cautionary tale of data loss.

Like a lot of members on here I have a huge collection of TV and movies stored on a NAS drive at home.

My current NAS setup was a 4 x 4Tb Synology unit. However when I set the device up, I grouped the drives as a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) thinking if i ever lost a drive I'd loose a quarter of my content and I could re-acquire the files.

Boy was I wrong, I had an out of the blue HDD failure 48 hours ago, and the entire 16Tb (of which about 14Tb was in use) has been lost due to a single disk failure. I tried every piece of software i could get my hands on, but alas, non of them would recover anything from the remaining three disks :(

Even a simple quote from a data recovery company wants over £500/Tb to recover information.


I am sure that I will not be able to replace 75% of the content that was on the NAS as it's been built up over the last 5-6 years, and a lot of the titles are no longer available. I never factored on having to try and find every single file in my collection again at some point.

Needless to say, I've now re-built the NAS with 4 brand new drives, this time in RAID5, so I have a reduced capacity of 12Tb, but I don't think I'll ever get that much back anyway. I'll also be using a service like Amazon Glacier or BackBurner to archive the NAS to once a month should a more serious failure happen (fire or theft!)

No doubt my ISP will be having kittens over the next few weeks as I try and rebuild my collection 24/7


WK

I feel for you. I had something like this (though on a much smaller scale) happen to me a year or two ago.

My set-up is similar to yours; a Synology box with a one-disk redundancy. Just make sure you use reputable drives made for the purpose and enable disk health monitoring and you should be okay.

I threw away 300 movies i pirated long time ago during a bad day , and i am still feeling bad about it

Ouch, that's painful to read. I think the ability to recover from a JBOD disk failure depends on the JBOD implementation. I think there are some where you would still be able to access the other disks.

How are the disks formatted in your config?