Glad you got it sorted and working to your satisfaction.
I just finished adding some more drives and expanding my storage array.
I have one more drive to swap out but that is probably a month away.
I just discovered the most sickening thing you can possibly imagine. About 40% of my data was DESTROYED when I backed up the main hard drive to the NAS. I have never seen anything like this in my life. I copied all of the pictures from the main drive to the NAS. All of the folders copied like expected, but I found a large part of them to be empty. At first I thought it just did a piss poor job of copying the data, so I went back and hooked up the hard drive again only to find that about half of the files that were not copied have also been DELETED from the original drive!!!
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Some of them irreplaceable family pictures (graduations etc), but actually worse than that is the product photos that took me thousands of hours in total. Often times to create one image with setup, lighting focus stacking 15 images deep (like a 20 hour process for me cuz I’m slow). Not just the final image, but all the raw, and all of the photoshop projects are gone.
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I don’t even understand how that is possible!!!
How did you transfer the files? I would always recommend copying the files and not moving them (cut, if you dragged them onto your share, then you did a cut and paste essentially) Copying, would not affect your source files.
Well, your data should still be on either one of the disks, most likely on your source drive (the drive you sent the files from). As you may or may not be aware, when you delete or data get deleted from storage, the data is not actually “deleted”. It is still there on the drive, but the reference to it is removed, and it can now be written over.
I’m not really sure what has happened in this case, but I would suggest trying something like Recuva from CCleaner, I have had good experiences with it in the past. Failing that I would suggest taking the affected drives to a data recovery specialist to try and recover you irreplaceable files, should have a high success rate, just will cost a little.
I would also heavily suggest not writing anything at all to either disks in the mean time, as if your files have been deleted, when writing new data to the drive it is possible that you may overwrite the “deleted” data, thus making it irrecoverable.
@vestureofblood Yikes!!!
- When was the last time you confirmed that data to be intact?
- I assume this was just a simple copy/paste action via the Windows File Explorer?
- Check the S.M.A.R.T. self-reporting status of the removable drive (How to check if a hard drive is failing using SMART on Windows 10 | Windows Central)
- Only if the drive isn’t reporting itself to be failing and if it’s not making any weird noises, then I would strongly recommend booting your computer with a live Linux USB stick and connect that drive to check if you see the same state of your files. This step is to eliminate the possibility of some weird Windows bug.
- Again, only if the drive isn’t failing, you might be able to recover a lot of data (but also unfortunately deleted stuff, and with no folder structure whatsoever) with PhotoRec: PhotoRec - CGSecurity
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You and me both.
Backup sw should only copy, and never ever ever ever move or delete anything.
It sounds to me like it wasn’t backup software per se, probably just a standard copy/paste action. But I agree that this doesn’t make sense, which is good, because the data is probably still intact somewhere, barring an extremely bad case of data rot on an infrequently used backup drive.
HOLD ON… It may have been some kind of a glitch (OH MAN I HOPE). Many many of the files that were supposed to be transferred were NOT, I am making a screen recording so you guys can see what I mean. Basically most of it has to do with folders within a folder. Example Christmas>2010>Moms house. The Moms house folder and any others in that layer are empty. However SOME of folders on the original drive that were coming up totally blank a moment ago are now showing me some images that were not there before.
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For the main transfer there is a system inside the NAS that did the file transfer. I had a friend help me set this up, and on the page where all of the NAS programming is done there was some option there to have it done. Later after he was gone I did some transfers of my own doing the copy/paste window to window thing from the PC without using that sofware and it appears that the files I did like that are fine. What I transferred that way were video files. Some of them like 5 folders deep and so far I’m not finding any empty ones accept one “project file” folder which might just have been empty anyway.
I would strongly suspect only a Windows File Explorer glitch. By coincidence I just ran across this:
@vestureofblood: I’m still in suspense! Did you ever find your missing data? Best wishes for a good outcome.
Dude that’s horrible… I’d look into a data recovery tool or even a service. Unless disk sectors are zero’d out / overwritten, perhaps the data can be restored
Thank you all so much for being here for me!
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YES!! I was able to access the data on my original drive. I still don’t know what happened with that part of it. When it comes to this kind of stuff my fist suspect is always me. Knowing that though, when I discovered the data was missing on the original drive I thought, “Well maybe I opened the wrong one.”. So I started over from the beginning etc. double checking to make sure I was really looking in the right place and really seeing what I was seeing. However, now all of the data is showing on the original drive so the only logical conclusion is that in a panic I still made a mistake. Like that some how I had both windows open to “Backup (Z:)” rather than one open to “Local disc (I:)”? Seems more probable than a glitch. In this case I could not be happier to have been wrong though.
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Something I was not wrong about is the failure of the NAS software to accurately make the file copy. Many of the files that are more than two layers deep are loaded with empty folders. I checked all the ones that I transferred like you normally would in windows and have not found one that was incorrect so far. A short screen clip of problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hhaSZmgx_s
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I wish I could just start over and do a new copy without using that sofware, but I have already loaded data from other drives onto the NAS and spent hours sorting it. Not interested in doing that all over again. I guess what I will have to do go through all the folders individually and “refill” the empty ones. After I have that done (probly 2-3 hours more work left to do), I will try running a backup from the first NAS drive to the second one that is installed in it using the NAS software and see if it has the same shortcoming.
Whew! All’s well that ends well I guess.
Well, I’m not not a fan of Windows, so that’s probably coloring my response, but I would still suspect a “minor” Windows glitch of not showing the actual folder contents to be what’s really at fault. Of course, there’s nothing “minor” about being presented with an Explorer window that seems to indicate that you’ve lost your entire digital life…
This shouldn’t be necessary. There’s an industry-standard tool called Rsync that is specifically designed to handle this sort of situation where a large transfer of many files in different folders could be interrupted. It should automatically check to see which files and folders have already been completely transferred during the last run, and then it will “fill in the blanks” until the exact same folder structure and contents that you have on your local disk are replicated on your NAS. The only caveat is that you’d have to make sure that the other backup software that you’re using is actually creating a transparent folder structure directly on the NAS filesystem, not throwing everything into an opaque database that only the backup software can understand. And I personally would not trust that backup software. It’s really best to stick with open source industry standard methods for backups, since that is such a fundamental concept of computing that hardcore geeks have already solved and perfected a long time ago. There’s really no need for proprietary solutions that just reinvent the wheel and often result in flat tires too.
So you didn’t lose your files? That’s great news!
Rsync is good stuff. I’ve used a Windows friendly version long ago called “”DeltaCopy”“:DeltaCopy - Rsync for Windows that might be the easiest way to get started. You’d use the client version on your computer and it would connect to the NAS (if rsync is enabled on the NAS).
I love rSync. I use it to copy files between a remote Linux server and my OneDrive to eliminate the need to consume bandwidth by pulling the stuff down to my own PC first
I’m working on the Rsync thing, or more like I got a guy coming to do it 
I watched one video about it and decided to call for backup instead.
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Meanwhile I have something else I need to get your opinions on. I’ve got a major security issue with my email setup I need to solve.
Currently I use one main email (gmail account) and the customer support link from my shop goes to that, all outgoing tracking numbers etc. The mail client provided by my web host is the saddest most inadequate thing I have ever seen. To resolve this the gmail address had to be “ported” into the website somehow ( I pay a guy to work on that too). The major down side is that my email address and password has to be stored in the webhost data base for this to work. The guy that works on it for me did encrypt the password so that it cant be seen even from back office of the shop etc, but the fact remains it is inside the database.
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I have recently purchased another domain that I will be switching to (Lumencraft), but its at the same host, on the same platform etc. I signed up for some Gmail thing that will allow me to have a business email name like “customerservice @ lumencraft” which I would like to switch everything to, but at the same time eliminate the email password from being stored in the database. So far the only idea I’ve had is running two separate emails, one for only direct customer responses and one for everything else. Not a great solution, but I could live with it if I had to. Is there some other way I could solve this problem and still have all my email in one place?
Hi there, so I understand that you signed up for Gmail for business with your lumencraft domain? In that case it seems like it would just be a matter of using that directly, assuming you like the Gmail interface. Of course you would also have to configure your website to use that email address for things like contact forms, etc. Generally you would configure your website to send out automated confirmations from a non-monitored email address like noreply @ lumencraft. Or you can also probably create multiple addresses with your Gmail business email. You could also configure a catch-all email address that will receive all messages sent to anything at lumencraft. And you can definitely integrate all your emails into one place in Gmail. Or if you don’t like the web interface then you can connect any number of email addresses to an email client software on your computer like Thunderbird or Outlook. Or is there something else I’m not understanding?
If I understand sb5637’s response correctly I would re-state it in terms that may be easier to understand. Your web host needs an email account to send out notices. You can set up a discrete email account for this purpose. That account would have a unique password and would not give access to your other email accounts. There are many email client programs, including Gmail and Thunderbird, where you can setup multiple email accounts with discrete passwords for each, that will allow you to have all your mail in one place.
Hope this helps.
I don’t want to hijack the thread but would like to ask this question and am not sure of the proper etiquette. For nearly 24 years I have had multiple DNS entries pointing to my network. I believed in the internet and that it should be a great equalizer and that we should all have equal opportunity to have a presence on it. I have had my little piece of the internet for nearly a quarter of a century now. As far as I can determine it appears that pretty much no one else sees things this way. Does anyone else here maintain their own publicly routable IP network?
I have dynamic DNS entries pointing to my home network. Not for public consumption, just for my own use when I’m not at home. I have a jitsi-meet instance in AWS that I fire up for virtual family get-togethers, and I would like to run a matrix server, and maybe join the fediverse somehow. But I haven’t gotten ’round to it.
But I don’t run BGP (ISPs that let you do that are expensive) is that what you’re asking?