Hello all, hopefully someone can give me some good advice.

I have a Lacie 2TB 2Big Network 2 NAS. It has NOT failed, but while upgrading the firmware I think I accidentally deleted my shares. It was not a matter of me clicking 'delete' by accident but rather that I uploaded some sort of config that was within a capsule package that reset the directories. The data is still there and intact but I have no way of accessing it as before because the directory listing has gone now.

To clarify, the drive still shows %60 full (just over 1TB used of 2TB).
Not all the directories were affected, I still have 2 public shares showing.
There is no clicking or drive failure related sounds.
I am pretty sure the drive is in concantenation mode which I think means it is not striped but as each segment gets full data gets put into a new segment instead of striping....I think.

What I have done so far:

I have been doing some research, found software called R-Studio which can help recover Raid 0 arrays.

Whats the best way to go about this and is there some way I can just rewrite the directory structure?

I already tried creating a directory exactly the same name that existed before and it gave me an 'error directory already exists' message - which is kind of hopeful as this may mean its just a matter of making it reappear again.


I am in the process of recovering some data but I would rather try and get the directories to reappear as I believe they have not gone but just been renamed as 'nothing'...if that makes any sense.

Thanks in advance for any clues you can offer.

Some links that may be helpful:

My drive: http://www.lacie.com/uk/support/support ... m?id=10477

The update capsule that wiped my directory structure is one of those listed on the above link.

First take an image of the entire device... then you can play around with it without risk of causing more problems

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I think you are at risk at causing more problems. Seek professional help if the data is important, not sure R Studio will be able to read the filesystem.

Update: Issue resolved and data resecured.

For future reference I'll post what I did.

I had taken the drives out (2 x 1TB) and attached them directly to my PC system so I could read them at whicvh point I realised this was not going to work because they didn't even show up. I had zero experience of raid setups till this issue arose, so I just expected them to show up like normal drives.

Anyway, after some research I found a guide explaining how to reconstruct a virtual raid block using R-Studio which is what I did just before posting here for more advice last. I had started a scan overnight of the drives and the recovery process of a few folders to see how they would emerge and as suspected although they looked intact after I tried to open them I got errors so I knew that process was not what I wanted either.

Then I discovered that the software also works over networks and that it may read the drives better if they were back in their own setup environment so thats what I did. I put them back (I had labelled them so I knew which was which).
Well the software encountered a problem over the network, probably some read/write access issue.

Funny enough when I browsed back to the NAS interface, it displayed the lost directories as 'recoveredMY directory name'.
All I had to do was rename them back (removing 'recovered') and that was it.

I guess I got lucky, but I will be backing up my backup in the near future because I cannot afford to lose that data and having read some of the stories regarding Lacie drives I now know it can all go wrong.

The whole point of having a 2TB NAS was to avoid backing up to DVD etc as those are even more unreliable IMO (scratching etc) but does this data backup never end for gods sake?

Do I really have to backup the backup of the backup?

/sigh

its only a backup is there is another copy elsewhere. It sounds like you did not have a backup drive.