What to do if your RAID system crashes ?
RAID Recovery - What to do if your RAID system crashes ?
We love using technology until it creates any problem. While using complex technology like RAID ton gain efficiency by minimizing risks and uncertainty against data loss, enhance the performance and reliability, difficulties are natural phenomenon likely to appear.
If one finds any problem with RAID server, the chance of accessing RAID volume is no more possible. It may not be insignificant task to get back or restore data on one’s effort; some highly experienced system engineers may be familiar with standard configuration without required knowledge how to save system from corrupted RAID volume. However, by applying some outlined procedures, it can help one to resolve critical issue like future data loss by determining success rates of data recovery with required right skill.
There are number of possible situations like:
- One disk failure and the RAID server is running in degraded state. Only some critical data is required.
This is very common situation can occur and users can easily identify and access system with immediate positive impact without any skilled engineers. In this case, RAID is still accessible but without any fault tolerance redundancy, next disk’s failure will result in complete RAID server failure.
All data which is in critical condition should be retrieved in another fresh disk before starting any rebuilding process. RAID recovery is IO intensive which could cause complete disks failure.
Once the critical data is safe, rebuilding process can be carried out.
- One disk failure and the RAID server is running in degraded mode but in this case it is important to save everything including boot-up operating system and application.
Some RAID server is used as application as well as data server. But it is not adequate to revive the data as reconfiguration of application would be burdensome. The best option here is to recover the degraded mode of RAID volume.
If the rebuilding process fails, one has backup disk to go further.
- Loss of RAID disk volume due to multiple disks failure, system crashes, power surge, loss of RAID configuration setting or other unfamiliar reasons
If this case appear one might feel data recovery assistance. Before proceeding, one requires to know:
If data in really significant, one may require backup the disk image of all the important working disks before shut down the system. One will always have a backup set to rework in case the main RAID server suffered any kinds of corruption.
Some information that one should know:
Strip block system and order of disk element in that the RAID volume is formed. This information is generally found in RAID configuration manager:
- Description of problem
- Description of user’s
- List of critical data and folders and any special needs
- Packing disks, including damaged as well as working disks, need special attention to pack up and send them to experts.
If one finds it impossible to ac cess the RAID volume, any attempt may create more complication to recover the system.
