10.9 DP4 + Promise Pegasus R6 = all data gone

[dtpearson]

Just a warning to anyone with a Promise Pegasus R6, make sure you back up to somewhere else if you are using 10.9.

I just had 7TB of family photos and movies (my entire kids lives) secure in Raid 5 disappear with the update from 10.9 DP3 to DP4. The OS seems to have renamed the drive?!?! and sees it as empty.

I don’t see any recovery from this. I have tried plugging the R6 into another computer and it is still seen as empty. The R6 passes all checks as running fine. Its just showing as empty.

I have a backup that is only a few days old but i was VERY lucky to have it (and it is a Raid0 so i am not out of the woods yet)

I know that 10.9 is in Beta, but i figured that my data was safe on an external drive if the OS died, especially in Raid5, not so obviously.

Now i need something that i can back up 7TB of data to... and fast!

 

[maflynn]

I think its good practice to have at least 2 copies of your data, regardless of what solution you are using to hold your data.

I use a NAS and have a USB drive that's the same size, and I copy my data from my NAS onto the USB drive - just in case.

Bummers on the issues though

 

[Macman45]

I have an R4 and will be keeping an eye on this...I do however have full backups....Promise have recently upgraded the firmware on the Pegasus range and I had an issue where it deleted all my trashes folders on the iMac....not a big deal to put them back, and now all seems well again, but worth watching.

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I would also strongly suggest that you report this issue to Promise and Apple.

 

[stooovie]

Download and run testdisk - it's a terminal based drive analysis/repair tool. These kind of issues are most likely due to mismatched partition table or corrupt headers and can be easily fixed. I'm almost sure tour data are still on the drive and can be rescued. Happened to me on a g-speed raid and several other drives.

 

[GermanyChris]

Just a warning to anyone with a Promise Pegasus R6, make sure you back up to somewhere else if you are using 10.9.

I just had 7TB of family photos and movies (my entire kids lives) secure in Raid 5 disappear with the update from 10.9 DP3 to DP4. The OS seems to have renamed the drive?!?! and sees it as empty.

I don’t see any recovery from this. I have tried plugging the R6 into another computer and it is still seen as empty. The R6 passes all checks as running fine. Its just showing as empty.

I have a backup that is only a few days old but i was VERY lucky to have it (and it is a Raid0 so i am not out of the woods yet)

I know that 10.9 is in Beta, but i figured that my data was safe on an external drive if the OS died, especially in Raid5, not so obviously.

Now i need something that i can back up 7TB of data to... and fast!

Check your drive permissions.

 

[Bear]

Just a warning to anyone with a Promise Pegasus R6, make sure you back up to somewhere else if you are using 10.9.

I just had 7TB of family photos and movies (my entire kids lives) secure in Raid 5 disappear with the update from 10.9 DP3 to DP4. The OS seems to have renamed the drive?!?! and sees it as empty.

...

Was the drive connected to your system when you went from DP3->DP4? For an unreleased/beta OS I would recommend not having external drives attached that aren't needed for the OS update.

Also, this is why people say beta OS versions should not be used on your day to day system. You never know what might happen.

 

[user1234]

I can not say this enough. RAID is NOT a backup solution. RAID is designed for speed or availability (depending on level), not to secure data.

You should ALWAYS have at least two backups of everything that is important. One local, for quick restoration, and one remote, in case your local one gives up, or is damaged in a fire, or even stolen.

It is very common that when a drive fails in a RAID 5 setup, another goes before the volume has been fully rebuilt. Then all your data is lost. The rebuild process puts a lot of stress on the other drives. RAID 6 will help a bit with this, since it uses double distributed parity, but it is still not a backup solution.

You should be very happy about having a backup, but a backup should not be placed on a volume that use RAID 0. One drive gone, and everything is gone.

I hope this serves as a bit of a wake up call, for all of you out there that does not consider backups important. "Drives don't fail that often, I'm sure it won't happen to me" is a really common attitude unfortunately. All drives will fail, it's only a matter of time. It can take anything from minutes to years.

I have lost data in the past, that was only placed on a single drive. I know how bad it sucks. Back it up people.

And don't ever fully trust a storage solution.

And oh, Dropbox and other cloud sync services are not a backup solution either. Make sure to backup stuff stored on these services as well, if you care about it.

 

[Draeconis]

Just a warning to anyone with a Promise Pegasus R6, make sure you back up to somewhere else if you are using 10.9.

I just had 7TB of family photos and movies (my entire kids lives) secure in Raid 5 disappear with the update from 10.9 DP3 to DP4. The OS seems to have renamed the drive?!?! and sees it as empty.

I don’t see any recovery from this. I have tried plugging the R6 into another computer and it is still seen as empty. The R6 passes all checks as running fine. Its just showing as empty.

I have a backup that is only a few days old but i was VERY lucky to have it (and it is a Raid0 so i am not out of the woods yet)

I know that 10.9 is in Beta, but i figured that my data was safe on an external drive if the OS died, especially in Raid5, not so obviously.

Now i need something that i can back up 7TB of data to... and fast!

To paraphrase, don't test out Developer Previews on a production machine, or expect stuff like that to happen :/

 

[dtpearson]

Download and run testdisk - it's a terminal based drive analysis/repair tool. These kind of issues are most likely due to mismatched partition table or corrupt headers and can be easily fixed. I'm almost sure tour data are still on the drive and can be rescued. Happened to me on a g-speed raid and several other drives.

Thanks for the info, i tried testdisk. It might work for many situations but in this case there was just too much data to work with, it would have taken weeks for testdisk to go through it all file by file.

Check your drive permissions.

Tried that, it didn’t help. Thanks for the suggestion.

Was the drive connected to your system when you went from DP3->DP4? For an unreleased/beta OS I would recommend not having external drives attached that aren't needed for the OS update.

Also, this is why people say beta OS versions should not be used on your day to day system. You never know what might happen.

I have never before heard of an OS update mucking with the data on an external drive.

I was happy to try out 10.9 in a dual boot situation on my iMac, i could always go back to my 10.8 partition, and i have backups of both boot AND my separate data, as well as TM backups. It was not me just “giving it a go” on my every day machine. This is exactly the reason i keep my data on fast external drives so a OS screwup won’t result in lost data. But in this weird case it almost did.

I can not say this enough. RAID is NOT a backup solution. RAID is designed for speed or availability (depending on level), not to secure data.

You should ALWAYS have at least two backups of everything that is important. One local, for quick restoration, and one remote, in case your local one gives up, or is damaged in a fire, or even stolen.

It is very common that when a drive fails in a RAID 5 setup, another goes before the volume has been fully rebuilt. Then all your data is lost. The rebuild process puts a lot of stress on the other drives. RAID 6 will help a bit with this, since it uses double distributed parity, but it is still not a backup solution.

You should be very happy about having a backup, but a backup should not be placed on a volume that use RAID 0. One drive gone, and everything is gone.

I hope this serves as a bit of a wake up call, for all of you out there that does not consider backups important. "Drives don't fail that often, I'm sure it won't happen to me" is a really common attitude unfortunately. All drives will fail, it's only a matter of time. It can take anything from minutes to years.

I have lost data in the past, that was only placed on a single drive. I know how bad it sucks. Back it up people.

And don't ever fully trust a storage solution.

And oh, Dropbox and other cloud sync services are not a backup solution either. Make sure to backup stuff stored on these services as well, if you care about it.

I cannot agree more, if data is not in 3 locations it doesn't exist. But in this case i lost two of my three locations in one hit. I actually have a off site backup as well but i only update it once every 3-4 months by swapping drives around.

To paraphrase, don't test out Developer Previews on a production machine, or expect stuff like that to happen :/

I hate that answer, it seems to get given on this forum a lot. I am not here whinging about the “new” DP OS lacking stability like some moron. We all come here looking for info and sometimes some help.

Is everyone here thats running 10.9 running it on a spare mac they have lying around? I bet most people on this forum are running it on their main machine. But i hope that most are taking the many layers of precaution that i take. As listed above, i have a 10.8 partition as well as the DP of 10.9 partition i was trailing on the internal SSD, TM backups and a clone of my boot drives on the internal HDD. I have all of my data in an external hardware Raid 5 for speed and security and a back up of this data on a external drive (ok, ok its raid 0, but i needed the space and its what i had handy). I also have the months old off site back up.

I just didn’t expect that a OS update (even a DP one) could screw up an external hardware based raid (not OS based). You never expect the spanish inquisition.

 

[dtpearson]

Was the drive connected to your system when you went from DP3->DP4? For an unreleased/beta OS I would recommend not having external drives attached that aren't needed for the OS update.

Also, this is why people say beta OS versions should not be used on your day to day system. You never know what might happen.

Just an update, i bought another Pegasus R6 to back up everything to again. And once the drive was initialised it looked fine until i rebooted the iMac.

Same thing happened, this time it changed the single 15TB raid 5 volume into 4 volumes two called “EFI” and two called “MyBook” of the two MyBooks one is 3TB and the other 12TB.

So it is not the update procedure. It must be something with the OS confusing my two external drives (my other backup is a WD MyBook). Its just weird that the OS is calling the volumes MyBook when the volume name on my desktop for the MyBook is Backup 6TB. It hasn’t been called MyBook since i bought it.

It could be the WD monitoring software (bloody bloatware) mucking with the Pegasus?

 

[stooovie]

Actually, testdisk can repair malformed drive headers. That takes seconds or minutes. Do run through its options and see if it can find your lost partition.

 

[dtpearson]

Actually, testdisk can repair malformed drive headers. That takes seconds or minutes. Do run through its options and see if it can find your lost partition.

It could not find the lost partition on the regular scan, it would only show the “new” empty partition that the OS created, and the EFI partition of the Pegasus R6 that is usually hidden. I started the “deep scan” but it was finding individual files, not the whole partition (and there is about 5TB of files).

If i had no backup at all, i might have spent more time with testdisk to recover something, but i still have my 6TB WD MyBook backup of the failed raid 5 Pegasus R6.

I have just bought a few 4TB USB3 drives so i can back up the MyBook. That way at least my data is in two places, not one. The only problem now is that my iMac is only USB2 so it will take about 2 days to copy the data to the new drives. I got spoilt with the speed of thunderbolt with the R6.

 

[maflynn]

If you hooked this up to a non-Maverick's computer, does your data show up?

 

[Ctrl2k]

I have a promise R6 and this is one scary sounding bug. Have you filed a bug report to Apple? They need to know about this.

 

[dtpearson]

If you hooked this up to a non-Maverick's computer, does your data show up?

Nope, i checked this straight away and it still showed up as an empty 12TB “MyBook” all data gone.

I have a promise R6 and this is one scary sounding bug. Have you filed a bug report to Apple? They need to know about this.

I will make sure that apple know. It might just only affect people running Western Digital’s software that monitors the Raid 0 in the 6TB Mybook that i had attached at the same time. It might not be Apples issue, but i will let both Apple and WD know.

Hopefully i am the only one that falls afoul of this problem before GM release of 10.9. This is the reason that developer releases of OSX are so open (and that is great), i don’t mind finding bugs that hopefully result in a more stable final result for everyone.

 

[maflynn]

Nope, i checked this straight away and it still showed up as an empty 12TB “MyBook” all data gone.

That bites

I guess that could be considered worse case scenario with running a beta.

Good luck on dealing with this.

 

[Draeconis]

I hate that answer, it seems to get given on this forum a lot. I am not here whinging about the “new” DP OS lacking stability like some moron. We all come here looking for info and sometimes some help.

Is everyone here thats running 10.9 running it on a spare mac they have lying around? I bet most people on this forum are running it on their main machine. But i hope that most are taking the many layers of precaution that i take. As listed above, i have a 10.8 partition as well as the DP of 10.9 partition i was trailing on the internal SSD, TM backups and a clone of my boot drives on the internal HDD. I have all of my data in an external hardware Raid 5 for speed and security and a back up of this data on a external drive (ok, ok its raid 0, but i needed the space and its what i had handy). I also have the months old off site back up.

I just didn’t expect that a OS update (even a DP one) could screw up an external hardware based raid (not OS based). You never expect the spanish inquisition.

I'm sorry you don't like my answer, that doesn't make me wrong. I spend my time helping people on here too; in this case, advising people against using beta software on production machines. (even a 10.x.0 release is pushing it).

I'm running it on another machine I own; I did an image of it, wiped it, and installed Mavericks with no access to any of my data, I'd advise anyone else doing development to do the same.

A beta's main weapon is surprise..

 

[dtpearson]

I'm sorry you don't like my answer, that doesn't make me wrong. I spend my time helping people on here too; in this case, advising people against using beta software on production machines. (even a 10.x.0 release is pushing it).

I'm running it on another machine I own; I did an image of it, wiped it, and installed Mavericks with no access to any of my data, I'd advise anyone else doing development to do the same.

A beta's main weapon is surprise..

Sorry, my reply was a bit harsh, but if the only testing anyone running a DP release was done on a clean install on a wiped machine, how would software conflicts between be picked up before the GM is released to the public?

As i said, i had many layers of backup which saved my butt in this case.

 

[Draeconis]

Sorry, my reply was a bit harsh, but if the only testing anyone running a DP release was done on a clean install on a wiped machine, how would software conflicts between be picked up before the GM is released to the public?

As i said, i had many layers of backup which saved my butt in this case.

Isn't that what Promise's QA department is for? 3rd party software/hardware vendors normally lag behind supporting a new OS X version, generally until the release of 10.x.1 or 10.x.2. GM releases have rarely gone smoothly in my experience, especially when supporting non-standard hardware.

It's great you had other backup strategies to rely on, but most people probably don't bother. It's a good rule to follow, generally.

 

[jordankirkham]

Same issue...any leads?

Mid 2011 iMac - 3.4 i7 - 32GB Ram - 2GB AMD 6970M - OS 10.9
Promise Pegasus r6 6TB - One week old - Installed OS with drive attached
Same issue. Reads "Mybook" 6TB Free.