Time to Brush Up on Drobo Data Recovery

[LarrySabo]

Just to close my contribution to this thread, my customer returned my hard drives and RAID enclosure yesterday and I refunded all but my attempt fee from the $1,000 security deposit he provided part way through the process. After many weeks of effort running ReclaiMe's Drobo recovery program trial against the clones/images on a PC running a fast i7 with 16GB of memory, it was stalled at 38% complete with virtually no disk activity and limited memory usage. He has abandoned all hope of recovering the data. ReclaiMe tech support suspects that the file map is damaged/incomplete and that scuppers any recovery hopes. Very disappointing.

 

[lcoughey]

And, if memory serves me correctly, my theory about drobo clients not putting much value on their data stands true with this client.

 

[mikem]

For info about Drobo, look at the Patents .. This one here for example (info starts some way into the document)

looks like Im not allowed to post links, oh well/.

 

[Jared]

For info about Drobo, look at the Patents .. This one here for example (info starts some way into the document)

looks like Im not allowed to post links, oh well/.

Try posting your link again. It's just the first three posts that are restricted to cut down on link dump spam.

 

[mikem]

ok,

https://www.google.com/patents/US20060174157

 

[RustyTheGeek]

I'm New Here! IT Guy in Texas that needs to try and get a Drobo 5N drive to mount. Everything was fine, then after a casual restart (mSATA drive was failing and was replaced the week before) it keeps throwing a "Mount Failed" error. I suspect at some point it maybe shut down hard due to a power failure even though it's on a UPS. Been poking it with a stick, nothing. Any thoughts?

- Currently playing with ReClaiMe Pro on another known good drobo 5n pack but not having great luck with that as practice before attempting the faulty disk pack. All the physical WD Red drives are fine. I'm pretty sure this is a file system problem. The drobo repair in the dashboard doesn't seem to do anything and then says it's finished and after a restart, still nada. Critical/Failed result.

Curious what data recovery professionals would suggest I use to block clone the faulty disk pack before poking those drives with a stick.

Anyone else have success with ReClaiMe Pro on drobo?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Jared]

[post]14489[/post] Anyone else have success with ReClaiMe Pro on drobo?

It's hit or miss. Right now, I'd probably consider using UFSExplorer Professional. I think they recently added support for Drobo, and I suspect it's much better.

That, or you can just get a clean clone of the drive (assuming it's having issues) and put it into another same model Drobo. That did the trick for the last Drobo I had to deal with when ReclaimMe Pro didn't work.

 

[RustyTheGeek]

Big thanks for the quick reply Jared! I'm fearlessly forging ahead with the time consuming first task of cloning all 5 drives (one by one of course unless I get some other PCs out and fired up) with ddrescue before I do anything else with the faulty disk pack I'm hoping to recover. Since this likely is a drobo filesystem problem, I assume ddrescue will do nothing to improve the problem unless there is actually some kind of disk problem I'm unaware of and the copy process does some kind of repair by way of exposing missing data. Correct?

I'll have to google and see about UFSExplorer Pro. In general, I would be happy to at least get a full directory list so I can see what is on it. There are some old backups but we don't know what we are losing now if we take it out back and shoot it. (And that definitely sounds appealing.)

In general, I've always been nervous about Drobo but the last 4 years have been flawless with three drobos and they started out as just network backup targets and eventually started being used for some network file storage too. I am going to push for us to go back to that because I've always been nervous not having a full understanding of how they work like I do with traditional RAID. And now I'm being proven right which is never good. LOL

I'll endeavor to share whatever I discover as time moves forward. Right now, my plan is to get all 5 drives cloned and stick the cloned drives into the drobo 5N box and see what happens. Because.... why not? :roll:

 

[RustyTheGeek]

Gave UFS Explorer Pro Trial a quick try... after following the steps in the video for the Drobo disks (my "thought they were good" test pack, not the faulty pack I need to regain access to), I get an error stating, "No valid BeyondRAID catalog lookup found." Hmm. Weird. I was really expecting these drives pulled out of a perfectly working drobo 3 months ago to be easy to test/proctice with but they appear to have problems as well. Or, I somehow busted them just connecting them to Win10 and running ReClaiMe Pro on them. Who knows? Oh well, time to go be a scout leader for a while. More on this later....

 

[Jared]

You didn't do anything crazy like allow Windows to initialize the drives, did you?