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Thecus N5200 RAID 5 Restore

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I have a Thecus N5200 with a RAID 5 configuration. Problems have recently occurred and Thecus support has suggested I make "Block copies" of each of the five drives before we try addition attempts at recovery.

Thecus has indicated that there "are some major problems on the EXT3 File System" (see attached error file).

Thecus has suggested "suggest to use product such as Acronis True Image". They suggest doing a block-level copy of each drive with "bypass bad sectors" activated. These clones would be made to new hard drives. We would then install the new clones into the N5200 and attempt restoration procedure.

My questions are these:

• Is True Image the best product for this application?
• Would Backup and Recovery be better?
• Would it be a good idea to attempt a full copy without "bypass bad sectors" activated in an effort to get a complete clone? I have read that Backup and Recovery may be more able to successfully deal with bad sectors without "bypass bad sectors" activated than True Image.
• Is there another Acronis product I should consider?

This is a critical recovery situation with no current backups.

Thank you for your attention/advice.

Attachment Size
juv-85533-350.txt 6.49 KB
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I'd defineltely make at least one backup before doing anything else, even before clonging. and I'd Validate with the ATI Validation function.
I'd also go through the steps of a restore except for the very last Proceed step, to make sure that ATI can see all of your drives for a restore process.

Then you will know you can always do a restore from the backup if anything else goes wrong.

Diff brands of imagers have diff specific pros and cons, but most of them are in the area of not having drivers for your particular hardware for the restore process (mos of them use linux for the restore environment to restore). Soyo want to test that before trying to clone or anytihng else. If the drive maker is recommeding aTI, it's certainly worth a first try.