Well, it’s been a while since I blogged here. Mostly I’m posting at twitter, and “officially” blogging at my company’s site – ctistrategy.com.
Still though there are things that don’t fit in twitter and aren’t appropriate for my company site, and I should talk about them here… and I will.
This time I want to describe a nightmare I had (unfortunately not while sleeping) and the solution.
On my Mac Pro, I accidentally deleted an important RAID set. I actually have multiple RAID sets. I have a “production” one and a “backup” one, as well as an off-site one in case of disaster. I just do RAID-0 (striping) for performance, figuring with the multiple copies I can recovery (almost) all of the files I need. I keep the production and backup disks synchronized via a great program called “superflexiblesynchonizer”. I’ve tried many and this one actually works.
Further, the important day-to-day stuff I work on is stored in a separate, encrypted, disk image. This Mac feature is very nice. Using “disk utility”, you can create an encrypted disk image. Mount that image up and give a password to use (and create) files there. Then unmount it when done returning the files to their encrypted container. I synchronize that file’s contents to my MacBook Pro. So essentially I have 4 copies of my most important content, and three copies of the other content (photos, music, movies, etc). That certainly seems like a nice safe way to store my files… Except that the off-site copy is frequently multiple months out of date. And when I need to expand the storage in my Mac Pro, I usually have to delete a RAID set, rebuild it on bigger disks, and recopy the data – leaving me a bit vulnerable (or at least leaving my data vulnerable 
during those procedures.
Well, I did such a rebuild, but during the procedure somehow deleted my backup RAID group and my primary one. Fortunately I had my off-site still but I had lots of photos, songs, etc, not stored in that off-site. There is no official way to recover a deleted RAID set on the Mac. I called Apple support and they essentially said “you are out of luck”. I did more research and found some expensive services that would accept shipment of the disks in question, muck with them for an indeterminate amount of time, and return them, either fixed or broken (expensive charge incurred regardless).
Finally I found a forum where someone mentioned that a company called SoftRAID might be able to solve the problem. SoftRAID makes RAID software (essentially a better version of software RAID to replace using the RAID built into the Mac and usable via “disk utility”). But in doing that their software also can convert Apple software RAID to their RAID structures, so they know how Apple RAID works. Low and behold, after a few exchanges of email and configuration files, they sent me some blocks to write over my deleted RAID disks, recreating the RAID structures there. I happily paid them their modest fee (which included a license for their software) and now I’m very happily running their RAID software with my recovered RAID sets. Phew! Very glad I found them and they did a great job getting my RAID set back. Now not to delete anything ever again!
