friday was not my finest hour.
2 of the readynas drives were showing as failed. i pulled one. everything broke. my nas then spent the next 3 days claiming that the entire volume was dead.
i have somehow tricked it into thinking that one of the previously ‘failed’ drives is not dead, and i’m copying files off of the nas as we speak to an external drive. however i’m seeing a lot of read errors when i copy files (mostly around my DNGs and NEFs, the files straight off my camera), which leads me to believe i’ve lost a significant amount of data.
so, what have i learned from this ordeal, in which i thought alternately that everything was fine, that i lost everything, and now the reality that i’ve lost some things, especially the things that matter most to me:
1) don’t panic and stay calm. instead of pulling drives willy-nilly, i should have started a copy to an external drive on friday and let it go until it was done.
2) back things up. more. meaning, before i even started this upgrade i should have backed up the entire NAS to SOMEWHERE, anywhere.
3) back things up, more. meaning i should have been copying my irrecoverable files on a weekly basis to somewhere else. photos, documents. not music files or things that i can get again, but something like “original RAW files from trip to europe with jen” would count.
4) sometimes shit happens. i was freaking out on friday. but i watched some west wing, went to sleep, woke up, talked to jen, and spent saturday out of the apartment, away from all the devastation. and after all this, i didn’t care as much about losing files. as jen said, they are just things. and as i was telling myself, it doesn’t mean i didn’t experience the things those photos captured.
on a more specific note about the readynas, i think after inserting a new drive, the right move is to reboot, let the entire RAID rebuild, and then replace the next drive. this relates back to #1 – patience. this shit takes time. i wanted 4.5tb as fast as possible, and rushing through it kicked my ass.
update: final tally, 173gb of 698gb (24.79%) lost, most of which were photos.