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I was at a small newspaper for several hours this evening trying to migrate all their (not backed up) data on their Snap Server 1100. It's a NAS, and was apparently running at 10bt, with over 170gb of data to copy off to the new nas (drobo) Finder was estimating 270 hours to finish.

It had been acting up recently, and following a reboot tonight it could not be logged into (pw fail) for filesharing. Using the soft resets that should have allowed login but not erased data, the unit is now stuck in some sort of disk verify/repair loop, it won't get past 5% complete with the verify and apparently has to complete this before it will make the shares available. (the hdd may have directory problems I would have no way of fixing, or io errors that are causing it to retry re-reading a key block forever) I need to see if there's any way to access the data on the hard drive when removed from the snap server. I don't recognize the partition table - it may be entirely proprietary. (could be linux or nfs, I don't have this level of experience with either) Does anyone have experience accessing a snap server's internal hard drive directly?
After some looking around there appears to be a small industry built around recovering snap server drives that have suffered directory damage. All of them appear to claim to have exclusive knowledge and expertise in dealing with Adaptec's "highly proprietary" directory structures. Lovely.

Guess come Monday I'll find out if that disk check ever finished, and if not I suppose next step is pull the HD out and check it for io errors. For once I'd actually LIKE to see io errors. I can fix that (if it's not too bad!) with some ddrescue to another drive. If the directory is hosed however, someone's probably going to have to cut a big check to the sharks.
FWIW, after an entire weekend of it doing its own blind disk scan, the volume mounted up and they were able to copy their data off. WIll be very thankful to have them off that, that's just inexcusable to spend many hours with no feedback while it holds your data hostage.
FWIW, Several years ago, I had a similar experience with a Snap Drive. I had hoped they improved in the interim, but apparently no such luck.
well this was a 250gb and judging from the technology I'd say at the time 250 was cutting edge, so this wasn't new by any stretch of the imagination.
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