Question

Combining 3 striped drives into 1 complete folder structure

Asked by: Uthar

Hey people,

I ended up buying a NAS box (Acer Easystore H340) a little while ago and ran into a few problems. The device isn't booting anymore and I'm trying to recover the data from all the hard drives (3 X 1 TB drives) before sending it off to Acer for a replacement because they won't guarantee that the data will stay intact.

The acer box was running Windows Home Server and had software RAID going (equivalent to RAID 0 - striped disks , keeping complete files intact), where all the physical drives are combined into one virtual drive, to which data is copied. Meaning, if I copied a folder with 14 files in to the NAS box, generally speaking 5 files went to 1 physical drive, 5 to another, and the last 4 to the last physical drive (all keeping the same folder structure)

I can recover all the data, but considering how many folders of MP3s (among other types of data) I had, it'd be ridiculously time consuming to get all the right files back in the right folders.  I'd like to be able to only add new data that isn't there while keeping the whole folder structure intact. Meaning if I had an "MP3" folder with 300 subfolders, I'd like to copy files from subfolder 1 from each of the  three physical hard drives onto the same destination folder (subfolder 1) without replacing the folder.  In order words, just fill in missing files.

I'm familiar with robocopy from work, however looking through all the options to use with it I'm not sure if it'll copy data to the right folders, or just try and replace the destination with the source folder everytime I start a copy from the next physical drive I'm recovering data from.

Any experiences with tools or utilities for Windows XP (the machine I'm doing the recovery with) that would make this easy to do?  I'm sure some exist, but my google searching didn't seem to turn up much.

Thanks for your time,

Tim

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Asked On
2009-06-27 at 21:47:01ID24527937
Tags

Copying

,

files

Topic

Windows XP Operating System

Participating Experts
3
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: fi3cPosted on 2009-06-28 at 11:56:40ID: 24732035

If the files do in fact copy completely to a single drive then you should be able to transfer with a simple drag n drop.  When you load the drives up individually to retrieve the  data is the main parent folder the same on all 3?  Or when the NAS was working properly did you access  a single folder to see all the files?

If so when you open each HD to transfer data to your backup drive/s that your using you should be able to copy/ paste the parent file over it's self and select "DO NOT overwrite".  This should achieve what your trying to do without the use of 3rd party software.

Regards.

fi3c

 

by: burrcmPosted on 2009-06-28 at 13:34:11ID: 24732355

A small program which will do this easily and much more reliably than WIndows copy, (which is likely to hit a system file and stop) is Super Copier 2.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/File-Management/SuperCopier.shtml

Chris B

 

by: UtharPosted on 2009-08-10 at 23:34:04ID: 25066579

I ended up using Synctoy 2.0 (http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C26EFA36-98E0-4EE9-A7C5-98D0592D8C52&displaylang=en) which seemed to work just fine.

thanks for the suggestions.

Tim

 

by: ee_autoPosted on 2009-09-18 at 01:21:02ID: 25363732

Question PAQ'd, 250 points refunded, and stored in the solution database.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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