“The worst time to discover a flaw in your computer’s storage device is the day a squirrel takes a dive onto a transformer and knocks out half the power on Main Street,” said professional photographer, Emily Engelhardt of Emily Jane Photography.
Emily used a 4 TB RAID Level 5 device to store many of her client’s photos, contact information, schedules and customer orders placed over the last year. Two of the four hard drives in Emily’s RAID set were damaged due to a power loss or spike. Recreating some of this information on her own would be close to impossible, extremely time-consuming and require a great deal of patience from her clients.
“It was incredibly stressful,” Emily told us. “I’d always thought RAID Level 5 was pretty much indestructible. I know I can’t be alone in thinking these devices don’t need to be backed up.”
Marketed for years as being virtually “bulletproof”, a RAID Level 5 storage device combines multiple hard drives together to create a RAID set. The big attraction to Level 5 is the safety factor. It divides parity data (essentially redundant file structures and user data) among multiple hard drives, typically housed in an external enclosure. Should one of the drives in the RAID set go bad, the remaining good drives literally rebuild lost files and directories using the parity data they store.
Unfortunately, a RAID Level 5 device has one major design flaw. If more than one hard drive in your set fails, you cannot rebuild the RAID set. The section of parity data that resided on the additional “failed drive” will be missing.
RAID recoveries can be challenging. DriveSavers has a dedicated team of engineers that specialize in recovering multi-disk systems such as RAID, SAN and NAS devices. Data recovery from these storage devices requires advanced knowledge of their file systems, as well as the unique inner workings produced by a plethora of manufacturers.
Just a few days after DriveSavers received Emily’s RAID, she was given good news. A full and complete recovery of her data had been achieved. Emily shared her happiness with us in an email along with one of the photos we recovered: “I was beyond satisfied and honestly, did not expect a perfect data recovery but I am truly relieved you recovered everything!” she said.
