Fingers crossed, it looks like all the pictures are saved. S used something called Disk Warrior (I think, but don't quote me on that), and the program pulled all the intact files off the two drives. He thinks everything is there. I only talked to him briefly this morning, and I don't think he's had time to go through the files one by one and see what's going on, but he gave every indication that everything is okay.
He said it appeared that somehow, the drives had gotten out of sync, and had been out of sync since July. Disk Warrior was only able to pull files up to July from one of the drives, but when he swept the other one, he was able to pull off the rest, which means something wasn't right with the raid set-up. Or something had gone wrong with that, or something like that. His theory is that because of this out-of-sync-ness, the drives finally quit mounting. They got so out of whack, that the whole system just stopped working.
I asked him if he was going to use a RAID again, and he said no. At least, not right now. Because clearly something went wrong. Later, I want to ask him if this has ever happened to anyone else in the history of RAIDS, because there was such a lack of trouble-shooting info on the internet about it that I wonder how unique this is.
Regardless, I will talk to him as soon as he wakes up (someone took a sick day today, and it's not me.), and hopefully he will be able to tell me with certainty that everything is okay. And then I will update this entry.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.