[Leica] World of pain

[afirkin at afirkin.com (afirkin at afirkin.com)]

I know some of you will probably say: "the idiot deserves all he gets",
but boy am I in a 'world of pain'.

A month or so ago, my firewire RAID mirrored light room catelog was
becoming very full. I decided to back up the RAID disks by
1. copying the files onto another disk
2. removing one of the RAID disks and letting the RAID re-mirror the data
3. storing the now spare disk from the RAID in a safe place.

All sounded like "overkill", but I really wanted to 'get it right'. So
first phase, I bought 2 terabyte WD disks and installed them into my
firewire 800 WD my book to make a 1TB raid rather than my mirrored 500 gig
RAIDS. So far so good. I then "dropped" the files from "photoRaid1" onto
it copied the files overnight, and the next morning started the same
process for "photoRaid2". I removed the first my book Raid and replaced
one of the disks with a "clean" one and left it to "mirror" (said by wd to
take 8 hours or so).

Next day photoRaid2 was copied, and there was still a lot of space on the
1TB disk. Oh dear. I did a detailed check of the disk and found that
PhotoRaid1 had not fully copied across. No warning, just 'stopped' half
way in. No panic, I should now have 3 disks with the data. WRONG. The
mirror did not work. I should have panicked right then, but no, I replaced
the disk and fired up photoRaid1 again. BUT the mirroring or something had
corrupted the disks. The message said: you cannot now copy to this disk,
so we suggest you get the data off "quick" or words to that effect. I
tried, but could only find 80%. Now terrified, I sought professional help.
A week later the "pro" said he could not find anything on any of the 3
disks.

So much for RAID protection. Seems the mirroring is not as simple as I had
been led to believe. Since then, I've been DESPERATELY trying to find a
way to store my data safely. I've re-built the entire lightroom catelog of
55000 images onto an ethernet WD sharedisc 2TB RAID. Now I'm trying to
back up those files and the ethernet bank of disks has gone on a GO SLOW.
It took 10 minutes for it to even recognise that there were photos in the
folders, and it would not copy. So now, I'm desperately AND SLOWLY
exporting all the files off the ethernet RAID back onto firewire RAIDS.
Its so slow and I'm now so paranoid that my every waking moment is
consumed.

When I finally finish, I will have a new LR catelog, I will split that
into 3 main sub catelogs, and I will back it up on 200 disks ;-) well
perhaps not 200, but at this stage I would just love the copying of files
from one HD to another to go smoothly.

Sorry for the rant, but I have a lot of time at the moment sitting
watching it copy files to the next disk. I might even have time to read my
LUG mail.

Yours TOTALLY CONSUMED

Alastair