last night i restarted my computer and windows said something happened and started to run chkdsk on a drive. i let it run and left the office. this morning when i can back and logged into windows, i was welcomed with a lovely sight showing 3 of my drives had been wiped by chkdsk...good going xp.

ive googled this issue and it seems to be quite common with external drives. have tried 3 recovery softwares with no results. yall have any suggestions or did i just lose 3tb of media

just rerip the cds...

That's a lot of porn.

just rerip the cds...

they werent cds. 750gb of movies from high school etc. little over a tb of video from boston. rest music. music i dont care for...i cant get it all back again in a week. the other stuff has me bummed. might end up paying for some professional recovery service to get back the videos.

you need to get a online backup service

CJ discovers meaning of Single Point of Failure - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And the statement "There are two types of drives; Those that have failed, and this that have yet to fail"

Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.

How to Tell When Your Hard Drive is Going to Fail - Stepcase Lifehack

you need to get a online backup service

i dont even what to know how much online backup would cost for 20+ tb...

will start buying back up drives and throwing them in the closet sad that the drives filled with expendable stuff didnt die.

Sad, but predictable. I'm a big believer in Murphy's Law.

I personally use a WHS setup to mirror my data. Works quite well

with that much data it's stupid to be spreading it over multiple single drives, at least setup a server w/ a raid 5 or 6 array. it's no replacement for real backups but will protect against drive failures.

todd, multiple servers would require at least a two fold increase in hardware (non hard drive hardware). thats space i dont have but at this point i might as well just do that and have giant raid arrays sitting here. lame ass newegg pumped the prices of the 2tb drives back to 200 will deal with all this after the 9th.

professional data recovery - expensive but if the data is worth the money

i dont even what to know how much online backup would cost for 20+ tb...

will start buying back up drives and throwing them in the closet sad that the drives filled with expendable stuff didnt die.

20+ Tb? Jesus Christ, man, you ought to invest in tape backup, or at least a blu-ray burner.

The thing about hard drive backups is, you need to spin them up every once in a while. Otherwise they may not.

20tb?

Madness. What the christ are you storing? Every TV series download on PirateBay? The entire BBC archive?

most if not all hollywood movies from 1995 onwards. 38 complete tv series. roughly 7tb (now 6tb) of music. 1 tb is taken up by math "research" that i have long abandoned. ive heard maybe 800gb of all the music i have. if i had to venture a guess id say that roughly 30% of all video is 720p. 10% is 1080p or higher. vc1s of pirates of the caribbean trilogy and lotr trilogy alone are like 310gb.

20tb?

Madness. What the christ are you storing? Every TV series download on PirateBay? The entire BBC archive?

piratebay is bad. private trackers are how its supposed to be done.

redundant offsite backup for that amount of shit. If you want to sleep.

Someone who is not willing to pay for anything is not willing to pay for anything.

most if not all hollywood movies from 1995 onwards. 38 complete tv series. roughly 7tb (now 6tb) of music. 1 tb is taken up by math "research" that i have long abandoned. ive heard maybe 800gb of all the music i have. if i had to venture a guess id say that roughly 30% of all video is 720p. 10% is 1080p or higher. vc1s of pirates of the caribbean trilogy and lotr trilogy alone are like 310gb.

Jesus, that is an addiction. PA meetings? (piracy anonymous)

why do you need that many movies? you can always buy (or download) them again at a later time

in the "piracy circles" there are seeders (people who host/share what they download) and then there are leechers (they just download and dont share with their peers). ive been seeding every since i got involved with the scene. it obviously will not make it ok with the people who have a problem with it but thats my side of the story. either way i will not change the minds of people whose moral compasses point due north (which is fine by me) so this is all i will say on this matter.

I would get a DROBO and load it up with some 2tb drives for the future. Automatic headache free backups. I use one exclusively for my iTunes lossless library. At 3 terabytes of lossless music right now.

dusty/todd/other hardware people - assuming i do raid 5, for purely storage purposes (speed has absolutely no bearing on what i am trying to do...the output will be bottlenecked by usb anyways) would i be better off with a desktop mobo or a server mobo. part of me wants to just build the simplest desktop possible in a big ass chassis and get raid cards which would increase the price of the total project by quite a bit.

1. regular desktop mobo with craploads of sata ports.

2. server mobo with craploads of sata ports.

3. el cheapo rig with some raid controller.

thoughts?

All I remember is the price quote for disk recovery on my 500gb WD harddrive 2 years ago was in the 1 grand range...

Oh and FWIW some desktop mobos come with raid controllers so you don't have to buy another pci based one, which can be expensive.

a desktop board is fine, you could use the on-board sata and software raid and/or additional raid cards. really depends on how many drives you have.