LearnShifting

Before I start on this post I want to reflect for a moment on the date. Ten years ago I was driving to work after having arrived in Melbourne on one of the last Ansett flights from Darwin. Helen was at home, 6 months pregnant with Joe resting after the trip. I turned on the car radio and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I rang Helen and told her to turn on the TV and she too couldn’t believe it. It was a terrible day and one that truly changed the world. May we all one day be able to reconcile.

From the horror of that event, let’s move to something nicer and closer to family. In the last ten years we have seen the demise of film in cameras and the matching increase in the use of digital cameras. I take a lot of photographs and although I don’t count them, I think I have about 40,000 or more photographs stored on a 1 terabyte hard drive which is backed up weekly using the Windows backup software that comes with Windows 7.0.

This article is long - the moral is short - back your cherised memories and check that the backup actually works.

You can imagine my horror when I discovered that the drive containing all of these photos failed 4 days ago. My last copy to another hard disk had taken place over a year ago and I didn’t know how reliable that was.

I went and had a look at my backup disk and there was my backup file, quite large at about 600 gigabytes or so and I breathed a sigh of relief. Dick Smith had 1 Terabyte drives on special for 79 dollars so I would buy one of those, restore the backup to that disk and all would be good again. I bought the disk, connected everything and hit “Restore” in my Windows 7.0 backup. More horror! The backup came back with a message saying it could not restore the file because something couldn’t be found and one of those obscure codes which you have to google to find out how bad the news really is…

The news wasn’t good but I knew there was 600 gigabytes of something on that hard disk, I just needed to be able to peek inside the backup. The other nagging issue is that most of my hard disk failures (yes there have been others) have all involved the photos disk. This photo disk is actually disk number 3 that has failed and it wasn’t much more than 18 months old. I use picasa from Google to manage my library of photos and am very happy with it… unless in some way it might be responsible for the disk failure. Likewise Windows backup which I use to create system image for my computer is stored on that drive and that too may have been part of the problem.

I am quite disciplined when it comes to tagging my photos with metadata as much to preserve copyright of the photo as to make it easier to find via a search engine. You may or may not know this, but tags added to photographs are stored inside the photograph or image file and can be read by other image programs or even File Explorer. I also use the face tagging feature in picasa which is constantly trawling the photo library trying to match names to faces. Any one of these activities may have provided the final digital straw that broke the hard disk’s back –but the immediate challenge was to restore the lost photos.

Windows backup files in Windows 7 are stored in VHD format which stands for Virtual Hard Disk. This means that you can mount this VHD file as a disk by going to the control panel and selecting System and Security, Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions and then select Actions, Attach VHD from the dialog box that appears.

This way a program can look inside the mounted disk and read the files. What files? Let’s find out.

When you use File Explorer to look at files on this Virtual Hard Drive you will see the backup file with its own icon, the backup dates and then a bunch of zip files within that backup date folder. Why so many zip files? Because windows backup limits a single zip file to be less than 200 megabytes. That may have something to do with backing up in little chunks rather than big chunks, but it is a given so we can’t change that limitation.

So now I what kind of file it is I can look inside with the built in Windows zip view and see if my files are there. I do so and breathe a sigh of relief – they are there. But I can’t restore them automatically because the backup is “broken” -  The windows site gets you this point I just shown you and then tells you to extract the file you need. This is fine if it is one or two files, but I need everything restored.

Also because backups are incremental, I need to restore the backups from earliest (the oldest backup in June 2011) to the newest (5 September 2011) and it was looking like I was going to have to do this one zip file at a time. In fact I started doing that and quickly lost interest because there are about 3000 zip files that need restoring.

I downloaded Winzip and WinRAR and if winzip has the ability to batch unzip, it didn’t leap out at me. With WinRAR I navigated to the folder that contained the zip files and selected a destination on the Dick Smith drive (actually it was a Western Digital drive) and said extract. It worked through each of the archives restoring the files to folders with the drive letters of where they came from.

What happens with files bigger than 200 megabytes? I don’t know yet. I just want the photos back and I will deal with the videos after that. If WinRAR doesn’t join the file parts together (concatenate) into a single file, I will be able to identify them and manually join them together if required.

Having seeming addressed the software side of the recovery option,  I turned to the hardware problem. Should I be trusting more than 10 years of digital images to a couple of 79 dollar disks?

Essentially I was using a DAS strategy for my data. Direct-Attached Storage is where you tack on the extra big disk generally using USB and you might share that drive to be used as a file storage location for other computers on your home network (or small office).

Philippe mentioned to me that he had purchased a 4 drive NAS (Network Attached Storage) device that came configured with RAID 5 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). RAID is where two or more desks mirror or share information so that if one fails, you can recover from the other disk. In this case we have 4 disks mirroring each other and if something fails, we can swap out another hard disk without losing data.

These devices attach to your network using an Ethernet cable and are tuned to the task of staring and delivering you files.

The Western Digital 4 drive solution with 4 terabytes on board provides me with 2.6 usable terabytes of space and I can attach additional drives using USB to perform backup tasks.

I decided that this would provide some peace of mind and although the list price was 699 from Officeworks, I was willing to pay it. Another gem of information was provided by Philippe who told me that Officeworks supports price matching and if the price is cheaper they will go 5% better than that price. There was an online store offering the same product delivered for about 640 so the good guys at Officeworks took the price on the web page I had printed out and reduced their price by a further 5% and I walked out of the store with the product for 606 dollars.

I am not a good bargainer, so I felt quite pleased with myself (and with Philippe who explained it) to have been able to get a bargain without feeling I was taking next week’s dinner from the shopowner.

So I have installed the NAS and my files are slowly being restored, but I still have the problem of potential device failure. Yet another product affectionately known as the ricecooker is a combined DVD/Bluray disk burning, reading, indexing and storage solution.

A Bluray disk can hold 25 or 50 gigabytes of data depending on whether it is single or dual layer. This means that a 100 disk Centurian Dischub could write and archive between 2.5 and 5 terabytes of data and once written, you have a permanent record on the optical bluray disc. Obviously we need to consider the life of one of these disks and have a process in place to re-record them every 6 years.

So, once I have my 40,000 photographs back online, I will write them to the NAS storage device and also write them to DVDs in the Centurian Dischub DVD version as a permanent record that I hope I don’t need to retrieve.

If you have read this far, I thank you for your patience…

I need to add the following disclaimer. The respective company names, brands and products may have trademarks associated with them and I use the names anecdotally to explain a series of events and experiences. I have no shares, interests or business dealings with any of the companies mentioned in this post other than as customer. The mention and use of products described in this blog article are for personal home use and don’t reflect opinion, usage or intent in regard to my work with my employer. As with most if not all of my posts, the intent is to share an experience and maybe some knowledge rather than to advertise a product. I’ve included this clarification as I have mentioned a few products and companies by name – all of whom I am very satisfied with.

This entry was posted on September 11, 2011 at 11:16 AM and has received 213 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.