My saga with the corrupt Drobo is rumbling on. The Data Recovery software I was running finally completed it’s scan in the early hours of this morning, having been running all week. I watched eagerly as the final sectors were scanned and the progress bar ticked over from 99% to 100%. And then nothing happened; it couldn’t find anything on the drive.
I have now switched back to the first software package I was using (which I though was slower). At least that was building a virtual file structure that I could see as it progressed. I don’t know how long this will take but I’m sure I will get there in the end.
Here is one of the images that I thought I had lost but have managed to recover from a formatted memory card.
I hope you like it and have a great weekend.
The Lightweight Photographer 
Your experience with the Drobo is disturbing. I recently bought one as my failsafe backup system. Now I’m wondering what I need to back up that system. I did set up dual backup. Did you?
As I mentioned in my other post, it’s not the Drobo that’s the problem. It was a faulty USB port on a USB hub. It caused the unit to unmount whilst data was being copied to it. The same would happen with any hard drive. And yes, I have a dual hard drive back up of the unit. What happened in this case is that I downloaded my memory cards from three back to back trips and had to shut down and leave before I had time to do the backup. I came to do the backup the next morning and the unit didn’t mount. The mistake was that I had formatted the memory cards before taking the backup.
Gee. I was contemplating getting a Drobo, which was highly recommended by Hudson Henry (a US landscape photographer). What do you think went wrong? Was it your only mode of backing up?
I am becoming very skeptical of backup plans. Even with multiple drives with multiple periods of backing up, if an error occurs undetected, it is backed up and replicated. Over a period of time, it becomes impossible to restore the undamaged files.
Right now I am backing up to a cloud storage provider. However, if an external hard drive is disconnected for more than 30 days, the provider deletes it from storage! Of course, changes to files (intentional or not) are backed up immediately, which means a damaged file is stored and overwrites the previously stored undamaged file.
The Drobos are great. They are as robust as the hard drives you put in them and you can hot swap drives to increase storage. The problem was a faulty USB socket which I have subsequently found. It dropped the connection to the drobo in the middle of updating. I added some more details in the reply to Norman.
Hello Robin,
I’m so sorry to hear about the terrible time you are having trying to restore the data on your failed drive. That must be very frustrating to think you finally got it done, then to discover that it was a waste of your time. Hopefully the slower software will do the job properly & you can soon get on to more positive things.
I also really like this photo you posted today & was interested to see what can be done with a 6 stop ND filter of good quality like your Kase ones. I now have both 3 stop & 6 stop filters from Breakthough Photography for my X-Pro2, & today I am getting the XF10-24 lens for it to use for landscape & architecture work. We’re taking a trip through the US southwest to Santa Fe, New Mexico in a couple of weeks, so hope to put it to good use using these ND filters. Also downloaded your “Lessons For Landscape Photographers” ebook & am enjoying it very much.
Jed
Thanks Jed, Hopefully I will be able to get at my missing data eventually. I can see its found over 750,000 files already. The 10-24 lens on the X-T2 is a great Landscape lens. I love mine. I’m pleased you like the photo and the free book. Enjoy your trip and make sure you get your use out of the Fuji.
A beautiful image, indeed, but what are you saying regarding the idea of a lost image found? Are you implying that the image was extracted after the card was formatted? If all images are deemed “lost” after formatting, how were you able to extract it? Did you use special software for this task? I did once extract images from a corrupted card but that was not formatted. One might ask, “How safe is formatting to erase data from files that need to be absolutely purged?”
Thanks, John Marsh
Hi John, formatting isn’t a safe way to remove data. All that it does is remove the file reference from the data table. The data is still on the drive or memory card in most cases and can be recovered providing it hasn’t been overwritten with other data. I did a low-level format on my cards as I was going to be swapping cameras and thought it would leave the cards nice and clean. Even this isn’t a guaranteed way to remove files from a drive. There are lots of paid and free photo recovery applications you can use (take a look at Mini Tool for a good free one.
If you want to stop people from retrieving your deleted files you need to do a security wipe of the disk. This involves overwriting the entire disk with random 1’s and 0’s several times. Even then it’s not guaranteed. Again, I think Mini Tools has a utility for this.
Great image. Our thoughts are with you at this stressful time. Hopefully all will soon be well.
Thank you. I’m sure I will be able to get the data back in the end.
Lovely photo.
Thanks
A great image! Commiserations re your hard drive issues – hope they’re sorted soon.
Thank you – I’m sure I will eventually get the data back.
This is a great photo with the foreground.
My sympathies on the data loss issue. I have a separate USB harddrive and Onedrive, but I have to remember to go back up stuff.
Thanks, it’s great you like the image. I have too much data and too slow a connection to put it all in the cloud. Watch out for those USB ports. It was a faulty one that’s most likely caused this issue. And something a lot of people overlook is that you should be using powered USB ports if you’re connecting an external hard drive that draws power.