Paritition Loss on External Drive (Drobo)!

[typecase]

Hello All,

As I write this, I'm panicked because my main external volume, the Drobo to which all pictures, movies and all my long term backups, was just repartitioned while I initialized a disk for my AppleTV using Firecore's appletv kit (an unsafe piece of software, imho). Now, I don't know what to do. I have a feeling all my data is still there, including the whole partition.

I've tried using testdisk and it sees a partition there that I think is mine but I'm not comfortable using pdisk to write it, further risking loss.

I know of programs like Data Rescue II, but is there any way to simply restore my partition without doing a raw scan of the drive? I want to retain my folder and filenames (since I meticulously organized these)

While I know I should have backed up the Drobo, it lulled me into a false sense of security knowing my data was immune to hard disk failure. Obviously not this kind.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[Objectivist-C]

I think you'll have to contact Data Robotics directly for help, normal file recovery tools probably won't cope well with the Drobo's special voodoo.

EDIT: You've kept it disconnected, right?

 

[xraydoc]

I suspect the usual utilities wont work due to the Drobo's file system

But this should be a good lesson to others - if its important, make a backup copy. RAID systems (Drobo included) are good to prevent a hardware failure, but offer NO backup if there's still only one copy of the data in existence.

I could lose my main drive, but still be OK since I've got everything backed up. Conversely, I could lose my backup drive, but I'd still be OK since its all still on my main drive (which I would immediately stop using until I made another backup).