For a small business, or even home user, the thought of secure data storage is very attractive. Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems are becoming very popular as they may be shared on a network by several PCs, some even purely by wireless interface. The idea of a RAID is that if one drive should fail, the other one will still have the information, so no data should be lost.
Recently, at CnW Recovery I have seen several RAID systems where it is the RAID controller, rather than the drive which has failed. This ends up with multiple, physically working drives, but no way to access the data. Most RAID controllers actually use some kind of Unix file system and recently we have seen XFS, ReiserFS and Ext2 as the data storage. The drives do also typically contain a few Unix partitions to power the Linux based controller system.
To recover the data it is necessary to remove the drives and then logically read the data partition of the drive. CnW software is being developed to make this as easy as possible, and new variations of drive layout are being added on a regular basis.
The main warning of this blog is that a RAID is not quite as secure as the manufacturers might imply, but at the same time, help is on hand to recover the data.
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