Data Recovery from Jaz Disks 48
mach-5 writes "I recently had an Iomega Jaz disk fragged by the drive (the data is corrupt from simply using the disk in another drive). I know that I can easily get a free (beer) replacement from Iomega, but what I really want is my data back, which is far from free. This is a little unfair considering their drive corrupted my disk. Has anyone had any success in having their data recovered by a drive company. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this particular company?"
Probably no warranty for data (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Probably no warranty for data (Score:3, Informative)
There have been other "Ask Slashdot" about good backup solutions, so those are the ones that can answer this question. Everyday usable media such as Jaz should not have been used for crucial data.
Re:Probably no warranty for data (Score:1)
Re:Probably no warranty for data (Score:2)
Re:Probably no warranty for data (Score:1)
Realize that the IT people had no idea that the Zip disks were being used for backup and were blamed for not thinking that the accounting dept never had requested any sort of backup medium. When the company's IT people with me and some others from the datacenter admin team went in that room there was a layer of dust on everything and promo material like frisbees, pens and shirts from the company's inception. Realistically I don't think that anyone had actually been in that room since mid-late 1999 (this was mid 2000 when it happened). Hey that is probably an uptime of at least 6-10 months on 2 NT machines, pretty amazing in itself.
Re:Probably no warranty for data (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably no warranty for data (Score:1)
Righttttttttttttttt, Iomega [iomega.com] sucks for reliability because the company bought zip disks and sat them on top of the server. Last time I checked this wasn't the preferred method for backing up to zip disks..
Sounds like the company is the one that sucked for reliability...
Re:Probably no warranty for data (Score:1)
backup! (Score:3, Insightful)
Recovery Steps-- Re:backup! (Score:2)
1: Make a physical copy of the disk (or an image) using diskcopy, dd, or something similar. I would further copy this copy so as to avoid further damage to possibly damaged media.
2: Try to recover the filesystem on the duplicate image using conventional tools. If that does not work or further corrupts the information.
3: If unsuccessful, use another copy and try running it through file recovery tools (The Coroners' Toolkit contains a utility called Lazarus which may help to recover at least part of your files for UNIX and similar tools exist on Windows). Read the docs before you begin, because of the potential for further damage.
Happy hunting!
I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd take the drive and be grateful it was offered. Most companies wouldn't do that much for you.
If the data was that important, you should have been backing up. Maybe that sounds trite, but it's true. You've learned a leason. I hope you can rebuild/replace the data that was lost.
Re:I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:2, Insightful)
Okay, so he backs up to yet another medium. What if it fails? Who gets blamed then? Where does it end?
I'm so sick of (computer tech) companies not backing thier products.
Re:I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:2, Informative)
Basically you back it up as many times as is ecenomically viable. nothing lasts forever and you will loose data -- no such thing as data you cannot loose unless its printed out on acid free paper and stored in a vault.
and no, no company is going to provide data recovery services. its not viable to sell a $100 drive with a $5 catridge if you need to spend $5000/customer recovering some idiots data who thought your product was a "backup medium".
Re:I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:5, Funny)
uuh...NO. CDRs and magnetic tapes have lifespans measured in mere decades.
This [rosettaproject.org] is a backup medium. If it can't last 10,000 years submerged in salt water or in a mountain cave, I'm not interested.
(HHOS [jargonfile.com])
Re:I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:1)
I'd say if it is absolute critical data, frequent tape backups to two separate offsite facilities, plus one copy onsite.
Re:I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:2)
Backup media do not have to be the most reliable storage medium available. In fact, if you employ a regular backup schedule, rotating media and all, your backups can sustain loss of data on any particular tape without losing very much (if anything at all) due to redundancy. Backups are for redundancy, and as such don't need to be as reliable as the primary storage medium.
You may be sick of computer companies not backing their products. I'm sick of people demanding the world from suppliers while only being willing to pay $99.99, or $79.99 from Pricewatch (not a real price--just said for effect). Storage media fail. Some fail more often than others. Iomega has been guilty of peddling sub-par hardware, but then again, they offer it for sub-par prices. You get what you pay for.
Well I hate to say it but... (Score:3, Interesting)
-- Tim
Re:Well I hate to say it but... (Score:1)
My advice: (Score:4, Funny)
On a level surface, place your feet, about shoulder width apart. Place the Jaz disk on the floor between your feet.
With your hands on your knees, slowly bend over. SLOWLY! Ok.
When you get your head as far as it can go between your legs, pucker up and kiss your own ass.
After you're done, look at the Jaz disk, gurgle up a bit of phlegm, and spit on it. Repeat as often as necessary.
Make backups (Score:2)
I know it's been said a thousand times...
CDR's are pennies each
A second, 100GB HD is about $120
Tape backups are slow but cheap
I know it can be a pain, buf if you have ANYTHING of importance, back it up!
On a side note, how much work/data/$$$ do you think are lost to data loss, from drives getting smoked to accidently deleting files?
Re:Make backups (Score:2)
Tape drives used to be practical when you could do a compleet system backup on a tape, but that basicaly isn't possible anymore.
What tapes do give you is the ability to actualy have a backup scheme. Tapes are relatively(compared to the drive) cheap, so you can keep incremental old backups so that it is possible to go back and see what did that
Re:Make backups (Score:1)
Most new drives these days seem to be at least 12/24GB from what I've seen.. Though it won't do your 120GB drive full of MP3's etc, it will do your system partition, or a partition of db data quite nicely...
Re:Make backups (Score:1)
What are you smoking? (Score:2)
What did your research consist of? Were you pricing only things larger than this [storagetek.com]? I've bought $250 tape drives that suit my backup needs perfectly. (Or are you slashdot-poor and is $250 too much to spend?)
Drives cost a lot for anything semi-reliable, and once you've got this drive, it probably won't backup a single hard drive on one tape.
Forgive me for being arrogant, but you are not so important that your most prized data cannot fit onto a single CD-R. I have a 15/30GB DLT drive and I can't even fill a single tape on it; I've started backing up unimportant data just because I have the space! There's absolutely no way you need to back up an entire 160 gig hard drive, and, if you do, any decent backup program (even tar, which isn't a decent backup program) can span tapes.
Tape drives used to be practical when you could do a compleet system backup on a tape, but that basicaly isn't possible anymore.
Sure it is. Not every system has 2 terabytes of 100%-used space, especially not someone's crappy home desktop.
- A.P.
Caveat Emptor (Score:2)
Good luck. But you should have been aware of potential failures in hard drives of all sorts, removable or not. I don't think you're likely to get very far on this one.
MTBF is the name of the game... (Score:5, Informative)
And as unkind as it may sound, they're right. Check your documentation, it says it right there. the drive can grind it's happy little heads through your magnum opus, negating all those thousands of hours of grad-school, and all you're going to get out of Iomega is a new disk. That's the way it is, and that's the way it always will be. Every piece of mass-storage equipment in my house and office has a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) which is a fanciful metric that tells you how often you can expect said piece of HW to go tits-up and die. Iomega knows that their storage solutions have these limitations, and they inform you of this up front, with that MTBF rating.
Jaz drives are great for backups, but you can't expect them to last forever, and you're a fool if you think that Murphy's law isn't hiding around the corner looking to fubar your day.
You cannot expect Iomega to take responsibility for every cartridge they produce, no matter what conditions it is exposed to. It is not Iomega's job to ensure that they can recovery everything that is every put onto those spinning platters. I do not know of any company that has that kind of a guarantee, and I'd be very wary of a company that promised it could. Entropy will always increase, and 3am hardware failure can deliver more entropy than you can shake a stick at.
None of this does you any good in your present position, but just like any other emotional tradgedy, there are steps and goals to help you with coping. Don't hate Iomega, how old was that disk, how much use had it gotten? Was it something you re-wrote over every evening to transfer stuff from work to home? Unless it died right out of the box (right on the leading edge of the bathtub-curve) you got at least some measure of use out of it, and Iomega succeded in delivering a product that worked. I know people who have used the same Jaz cartridge for 5+ years, millions of cycles, without incident. Others have had bad media that went south in a week.
Iomega is not to blame for the statistical blip that you were on the receiving end of, and there is almost nothing they can do for you at this point. I'm not trying to push responsibility onto you for the failure, but you can't really blame Iomega, and they are not going to eat the recovery cost for the data.
And that brings us to the next step, recovering your data. This is something you're going to have to pay for out of your own pocket, and you probably want to analyize your options before you start writing checks. There are several companies that do drive recovery and have a 'free-evaluation' process. You ship them the drive, they tell you how much cash to cough up to recovery it. This gives you an option to decided if all that pr0n is really worth $4000 of your student loan money. I would suggest talking to someplace like Accurate Data Recovery [a-data.com], Flat Rate Data Recovery [flat-rate-...covery.com] or some other place that isn't liable to hand you a $3000+ bill for pulling the data. note: I have no experience or interest in these companys. YMMV, do your homework, google.com [google.com] is your friend.
All else fails, rip off the housing, drill a hole in the platter and nail it to the wall in your data center. This may act as a gruesome deterent to the other equipment in the room and keep them in line. Good luck.
Dealing with Iomega (Score:2)
This was during a period of bad press for Iomega (remember Click of Death?) so maybe they were being more responsive than usual.
Re:Dealing with Iomega (Score:2, Informative)
The poster wants them to pay for data recovery off the failed media.. I doubt that will happen
DriveSavers (Score:3, Informative)
Strategy. (Score:2)
Yeah, ask 'em for a Ditto drive instead. That way, you'll at least _know_ it's an unreliable piece of shit.
--saint
Has anyone here heard of backups? (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's important to you, back it up. It doesn't matter how you do it: a rdist to another machine every night, a stack of floppies, CD-Rs, another Jaz disk, printouts, or getting it included in the next Information Society single as 150 baud line noise. The three key words: back it up. You're fully free to blame whoever you want, but, if it was important, it was up to you, and nobody else, to make sure it didn't get destroyed.
Life sucks. Next time, back it up.
- A.P.
Uhhhh (Score:1)
Re:Uhhhh (Score:2)
My linux WS: 40GB hard drive
My wife's M$ WS: 40GB drive
80 GB that potentially need to be backed up.
Parts list:
2 80GB drives ($100 for a Maxtor)
1 IDE RAID controller
1 small drive to boot linux/Samba on
1 PC to host the thing
1 DDS tape drive
LEGO Mindstorms (to make an autoloader)
RAID the IDEs together for 80 GB mirrored. In order for my data to be completely lost, my drive would have to fail and BOTH Maxtors would have to fail. In the event that happens, I have DDS backups of the RAID. Now, in case of fire, rotate the tapes off site... you see, paranoia can be taken to any level. In my case though, $1000 gets you a pretty stable, reliable backup solution. I don't know what could be called a PERFECT solution.
I just spent 15 hours recovering my wife's MP3s. $1,000 seems like a small price to pay now.
Backing up.. (Score:1)
Which then fails as he copies the files..
Iomega (Score:1)
Backup medias are a tricky thing. CDs are great they last but are small.
Harddives are great too but tend to get slightly expensive depending on how much you have to back up, if i was to back up i would have prolyl 20+ gigs of data to save. and i can hardly justify spending 60 for a harddisk that will only hold what i need to back up now. and im sure i will have to back more up later.
Tapes well again with cost. Drive=XXX Media=XXX per-pop.
Most Users would prolly be ok Just burning documents and etc... to a CD now and then. I recently backed up all my digital pictures to a CD (~300Megs-o-Data). And some website stuff to ZIP disk(~@20Megs-o-data)... Maybe a combination of backup medias is best for some. Can update the ZIP as often as nessary. and the pics when there are a signifigant number of new ones.
If your data's mostly text (Score:1)
dd if=/dev/sg?? bs=1024 | strings | lpr
This will both recover what data it can, and back it up to a stable medium all at the same time.
But remember, dd can be both your best friend and your worst enemy. Sit on your hands and read the full command before hitting enter. It can suck to plaster your english essay over the boot sector of your hardrive.
dd stands for Destroy Disk (Score:2)
This is exactly what I did once. Well, it wasn't an English essay, but close enough. I had to use the drive manufacturer's low-level format utility just to make it useable again. Of course, that effectively fragged the disk. Thankfully, nothing important or irreplaceable.
My boss laughed for a week.
Data Recovery (Score:3, Informative)
2) Don't use defrag. Same problem.
3) http://grc.com/intro.htm
Try using spinrite - there's a chance the data can be recovered with that.
Failing that, get Dolly - it's used to clone partitions. Clone it to a HD and then start looking at repair options.
It's possible, its time intensive, and it's a royal pain- I hope you know what is on that disk because, otherwise, it's goign to be nearly impossible.
Oh, and remember to have fun
Re:Data Recovery (Score:2)
If you have access to a Unix/Linux box, you can use dd instead like this;
dd if=/dev/input_device of=destination
Where "input_device" is the device name, and destination is where you want the image to go (another device or a backup location). Once there, you can pop in a blank disk and restore the image to that before you start using any recovery tools. If you screw up your copy, make another.
Replacement and data recovery experiences (Score:1)
Iomega was actually quite helpful as long as I put up with all of the handholding and troubleshooting steps they read of their scripts before telling them what the problem was. They sent me a replacement - another refurbed drive. If worked - for 3 days, then died. I also found out that the first drive munged one of my carts. Another call, they sent me another drive. This one worked for a week and then died. I now had 2 bad carts (killed by their drives) and I had gone through three refurbed drives. I tried to remain calm, explaining how it was not acceptable for them to keep eating my carts by sending me defective drives.
The told me they could not offer any data recovery services, and that I used the old carts at my own risk. However, to make up for my trouble, they sent me a brand new drive and brand new carts to replace the ones that got eaten.
Not an ideal situation, but to their credit, they did make a decent attempt to do right by me, and for my $130 and a bit of hassle, I got myself a $300 drive and another $300 worth of new carts. This was a pretty good experience compared to the horror stories of Iomega customer service back in the early days of Zip disks.
-Jeff
sorry to say it... (Score:2)
I have seen countless jazz drives and disks go bad over the years, both the 1 and 2 Gb versions. Makes me all the much more merrier that I didn't buy one and instead opted for CDRs.