NTFS data deduplication and RAID recovery

A forum on data recovery using the professional data recovery software R-STUDIO.
ThereGoesPlanB
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NTFS data deduplication and RAID recovery

Post by ThereGoesPlanB » Tue Dec 06, 2016 9:52 pm

I have a large (13 drive) RAID6 array that had a single NTFS volume with data deduplication enabled. The SAS card I'm using flaked out and caused my LSI 9361-8i to lose the virtual drive. I'm currently waiting for new hardware in order to store disk images for each of the drives. I'm wondering if data deduplication will have any adverse affects on R-Studio being able to detect the RAID parameters or view file content before recovery. Lastly, I'm curious how long detecting parameters (including drive order) might take on an array of this size since the number of possible parameters grows exponentially with each drive added.

Alt
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Re: NTFS data deduplication and RAID recovery

Post by Alt » Wed Dec 07, 2016 12:05 pm

Data deduplication doesn't affect RAID parameter detection. The problem is that the current version of R-Studio doesn't support NTFS deduplication. If a file has its data deduplicated, it won't be recovered. Sorry.
I cannot predict how long it'll take to detect the parameters of such RAID. I reckon, a lot of time.

Data-Medics
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Re: NTFS data deduplication and RAID recovery

Post by Data-Medics » Tue Dec 13, 2016 11:54 am

I'd say there is a 99.999% chance that RAID parameters detection will fail to detect the parameters of that array. In fact, I've never yet seen a RAID 6 that was auto detected personally. Let alone one with so many drives.

That's going to be a nightmare of a recovery, just FYI. Our pricing here to do it would be a minimum of $8,000, but very likely could end up being even more once we get a full measure of how difficult it'd be. RAID 6 is several layers of difficulty more complex than a RAID 5 is. We usually resort to studying the metadata stored on the drives to help determine things like drive order and stripe size. Takes a bit of reverse engineering and careful study, along with a good amount of experience to do successfully.

As to the de-duplication, that's really a moot point in my opinion. Once you have the RAID parameters, you can recover the entire volume as an image onto a new array volume and work with it just as before.

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