Want to know what a very scary sound is here in The Nerdery?
A beeping sound coming from the main hard drive tower indicating that the controller has found a fault in one of the eight drives that form two four-drive RAID-5 arrays.
It’s a very distinctive tone that is very different from the two uninterruptible power supplies that protect the laptop and everything hanging off of it from Carolina Flash and Flicker’s occasional interruptions to the electricity round here.
And that tone is something I never want to hear because those RAID-5 arrays are where the photos that have been moved off the laptop into the first level of archival backup live.
For a photographer, nothing is more important than protecting the photographs!
Fortunately, I’d just synchronised the two arrays as part of backing up the web sites before that drive decided to go where lots of bad hard drives go…on the desk as a spiffy looking paperweight!
One emergency order to Amazon and I had two brand-new Western Digital 10TB Red Plus drives (for 33% off…nice!) that are now installed in the box that holds five drives sitting on top of the array tower…two 6TB drives, one 4TB drive, and the two new 10TB drives for a total of 36TB of storage.
The last day has been spent archiving 4TB of photos to an external drive that is now sitting in a drawer as a detached backup and also to one of the 6TB drives which already had a couple of terabytes of photos that were in the second level of archival backup.
Once those backups were done, it was pretty trivial to launch Lightroom and tell it where the drives containing the first and second level archives were now located. What was really slick was how easily Lightroom merged the records for the two second level archive drives into one catalog to reflect all of those photos fitting on one drive (barely!).
There’s still a bit of work to do. The laptop is currently restoring a backup from one of the 4TB drives that was replaced by the new 10TB drive now sitting in it’s bay in the drive enclosure at which point that 4TB drive becomes a ready spare in case one of the arrays has another drive crap out on me.
Then there will be a backup taken of Lightroom’s data to that new 10TB drive.
Once that’s done, the last step is to take the other 4TB drive that came out of that enclosure and install it in the drive caddy and then power up the drives of the stricken RAID-5 array. If all goes well, the controller should see a new drive in the place of the one that died and then automatically rebuild the RAID-5 array using the other three good drives to determine what the new drive ought to look like.
It’ll probably take quite a while to rebuild but that’s much better than trying to figure out how to replace hundreds of thousands of photos that were on that array!
You never truly appreciate a backup plan until you have to actually put it in play! 🙂