Hey folks, thanks in advance for your wizardry.
We've been running a Dell PowerEdge server with SBS 2003 for 3 years. No problems. RAID 5, 3 drives. Backing up daily to a USB hard drive. Swapping that drive out every week. Two drives in rotation. Seemed like a bullet proof setup to me.
Last week the server failed. Won't turn on. Don't know why. Maybe power supply. That's a different topic. In the meantime, we're trying to access the data that was stored on the server. I figured it would be no problem.
However, without the server, there seems to be no way to access the data on the RAID drives. They sort of become worthless in a situation like this!
We turned to the backups. For some unknown reason the most recent backup was 3 weeks before the failure. We can live with that. Tried restoring via Backup Utility on a XP Pro machine. Receive "The backup file contains unrecognized data and cannot be used" error.
Went ahead and used a third party recovery tool. It kind of worked. But it left 20,000 files homeless without directories. Not good.
So here I am with data everywhere, and no good way to access any of it.
Solutions? Recommendations?
