Lacie 2Big Network 2 (2TB Concatenation), advice needed pls.

[Hunter33]

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.

[drc]

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

[HDD Spaz]

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.

[Hunter33]

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

[HDD Spaz]

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