[Leica] World of pain

[richard at imagecraft.com (Richard Man)]

RAID is just oversold to consumers. I learned it the hard way 3 years ago.
As I mentioned to the other lister just a couple weeks ago when he asked -
STAY away from RAID unless you are a PRO. Consumers using RAID seems to be
just a gimmick that causes more pain than anything else.

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:46 AM, <afirkin at afirkin.com> wrote:

> I know some of you will probably say: "the idiot deserves all he gets",
> but boy am I in a 'world of pain'.
>
> A month or so ago, my firewire RAID mirrored light room catelog was
> becoming very full. I decided to back up the RAID disks by
> 1. copying the files onto another disk
> 2. removing one of the RAID disks and letting the RAID re-mirror the data
> 3. storing the now spare disk from the RAID in a safe place.
>
> All sounded like "overkill", but I really wanted to 'get it right'. So
> first phase, I bought 2 terabyte WD disks and installed them into my
> firewire 800 WD my book to make a 1TB raid rather than my mirrored 500 gig
> RAIDS. So far so good. I then "dropped" the files from "photoRaid1" onto
> it copied the files overnight, and the next morning started the same
> process for "photoRaid2". I removed the first my book Raid and replaced
> one of the disks with a "clean" one and left it to "mirror" (said by wd to
> take 8 hours or so).
>
> Next day photoRaid2 was copied, and there was still a lot of space on the
> 1TB disk. Oh dear. I did a detailed check of the disk and found that
> PhotoRaid1 had not fully copied across. No warning, just 'stopped' half
> way in. No panic, I should now have 3 disks with the data. WRONG. The
> mirror did not work. I should have panicked right then, but no, I replaced
> the disk and fired up photoRaid1 again. BUT the mirroring or something had
> corrupted the disks. The message said: you cannot now copy to this disk,
> so we suggest you get the data off "quick" or words to that effect. I
> tried, but could only find 80%. Now terrified, I sought professional help.
> A week later the "pro" said he could not find anything on any of the 3
> disks.
>
> So much for RAID protection. Seems the mirroring is not as simple as I had
> been led to believe. Since then, I've been DESPERATELY trying to find a
> way to store my data safely. I've re-built the entire lightroom catelog of
> 55000 images onto an ethernet WD sharedisc 2TB RAID. Now I'm trying to
> back up those files and the ethernet bank of disks has gone on a GO SLOW.
> It took 10 minutes for it to even recognise that there were photos in the
> folders, and it would not copy. So now, I'm desperately AND SLOWLY
> exporting all the files off the ethernet RAID back onto firewire RAIDS.
> Its so slow and I'm now so paranoid that my every waking moment is
> consumed.
>
> When I finally finish, I will have a new LR catelog, I will split that
> into 3 main sub catelogs, and I will back it up on 200 disks ;-) well
> perhaps not 200, but at this stage I would just love the copying of files
> from one HD to another to go smoothly.
>
> Sorry for the rant, but I have a lot of time at the moment sitting
> watching it copy files to the next disk. I might even have time to read my
> LUG mail.
>
> Yours TOTALLY CONSUMED
>
> Alastair
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>



-- 
// richard <http://www.imagecraft.com/>
// icc blog: <http://imagecraft.wordpress.com>
// photo blog: <http://www.5pmlight.com>
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