Advanced users, especially enterprise-level system administrators prefer to setting up RAID within a network or on a PC, due to fault tolerance and improved performance. It is a reliable way of storing big amount of data indeed, however, for a lot of reasons, we are still facing the trouble of losing data from a RAID drive.
If this is your first time trying to recover data from RAID disks, it can be kind of daunting. So, we are here breaking down first aids and feasible solutions to get the lost data back, so you can regain access to them without hassles.
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RAID, which means Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology applied to store data on multiple physical disks in the same logical unit. It allows data redundancy and fault tolerance, which makes your storage more reliable and efficient.
It uses 3 different ways to store data:
Therefore, there are several different types of RAID and the most common ones are:
As you can see, different levels of RAID configurations have their own pros and cons, but RAID drives are trustworthy to protect our data and minimize the downtime when disk failure happens. Nerveless, data loss from RAID disks is still inevitable.
Yes, we can.
First, we can have a glimpse at the possible causes of a data loss on RAID drive:
For data loss caused by hardware or software issues, there are first aids to rescue your data, just replace with a new piece of hardware, or keep the software updated to latest version.
And for loss caused by others, for the reason that RAID drive uses mirroring to duplicate data across multiple drives, it is possible to recover by rebuilding the data using different techniques.
Even you’ve deleted the files on a RAID drive, the data won’t be wiped out instantly, because a deleted file is only gone forever when there is new data overwriting it. So in this case, you need to stop using the RAID drives, and use a professional tool to restore the data as soon as possible.
Data recovery is getting more easier and cheaper, as we have so many data recovering programs available in this digital world, so why bother yourself of hiring an expert?
We’ve tested a lot of them, paying attention to recovery rate, ease of use, additional features, pricing, customer support and so on. Cisdem Data Recovery is proved to be one of the best choices.
Cisdem Data Recovery supports data recovery from all kinds of RAID types, including RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10. It can auto detect RAID configurations and provide professional support when RAID is not detected. No matter the files on your RAID drives is a video, photo, song, document, email, bookmark, archive or others, Cisdem recovers them all, showing detailed file information and allowing users to preview the file before restoring.
Besides, Cisdem Data Recovery lets users recover data from any internal and external hard disks in different file systems, even retrieve data from SD card, NAS, Linux or crashed PC. Here you can check its main features as follows:
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Instead, if you don’t want to start with a data recovery program, you can turn to following methods to get the job done under certain circumstances. As we can just replace the damaged hardware with a new one, or use the built-in feature in your Windows to fix this issue.
Sometimes the reason why you lost data from a RAID drive might lie in the PC that you are connecting the drive to. It is too slow, or outdated to handle modern RAID-related software, even the hardware is failing, especially when your RAID drives are under heavy stress to deal with a large amount of data.
Therefore, you are recommended to unplug the RAID drives and connect to another PC that under good condition. By doing so, you can also check if the issue is caused by RAID drive itself or not, and take appropriate measures.
When a drive behaves improperly, we will be recommended to run CHKDSK in Windows to scan and fix the errors, this can be also done to a RAID drive. Disk check can be launched in File Explorer, also can be run with command prompt, here we use File Explore to show you the repair process.
If above 2 solutions won’t solve your problem, it is much likely your RAID drive is physically damaged and you have to replace with a new one. For the reason that RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6 and RAID 10 allows data redundancy, if one of the RAID drives is damaged, you can rebuild the data on a replaced RAID disk. If you are using RAID 0, data rebuilding is impossible, you have to use a professional data recovery program to restore your data.
To rebuild data on a new drive and recover the data from RAID, you should:
Remarks
The rebuilding process varies in different types of manager programs, some may auto rebuild the data after inserting a new RAID drive. If you are using a hardware to manage your RAID drives, such as a controller, you need to remove the covers first, then pull out the failed drive that has a red alarm, insert the new drive and replace the covers. Once the rebuilding is done, the alarm will disappear and you can access to your data again.
In the case that rebuilding data on your RAID drive is failed or impossible, such as you are using RAID 0 configuration, then you can try to clone the disk to a healthy one using a 3rd party cloning software. DiskGenius is a free tool to help you on this.
Also, if you have a habit of backing up important files on PC and actually did so with the built it tool File History, then the situation becomes much easier, you just need to recover the lost RAID data from a backup.
RAID data recovery is as difficult as you think, most RAID types support data redundancy, which makes data recovery possible. Therefore, you can easily recover with a replacement, or use professional tools to retrieve. When deciding on which tool to use, the recovery rate is always the most important thing to consider.
Zoey shows a great interest in what she does. Although not long with Cisdem, she has possessed a professional understanding of data recovery.
