[GTALUG] Advice request

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 11:57:49AM -0500, o1bigtenor wrote:
> Greetings
> 
> I have a large system with a fair number of resources which has just come
> home from the hospital (computer) when I had a disk drive fail abruptly.
> 
> 1.The tech tells me that the hard drive can be accessed. How do I do a low
> level transfer to another hard drive?
> (This would mean that I would have empty sectors but there is some
> information that I would like to get.)

ddrescue can be handy for taking an image of a slightly defective
disk to somewhere else, so that you can then experiment on the copy to
recover things.

> 2. The drive was my 'operating system' drive. That meant that here is where
> I kept my 14 VirtualBox machines. (One was my business record keeping
> (accounting) and that is the one that I want real bad but its only 16
> months of data so it can be redone but its painful!)
> 
> How do I set up the hard drive so that files can be moved to my RAID array
> (which should be just fine) - - - or should I?
> Should I be setting up this drive as it was before but just looking for a
> way to do backups?
> As I understand it operating systems on RAID isn't nice - - - or is it?

I think everything should be on RAID (and RAID0 doesn't count of course).
OS, swap, data, everything.  Disk failures happen, and they are a waste
of time to have to deal with.  RAID is of course NOT backup and not a
sustitute (since RAID does nothing to protect against data corruption
and user errors).

> I am looking for something that doesn't crap out so completely. I
> understand I should have had backups but I wasn't able to get the shared
> folder stuff working so that I could seamlessly transfer stuff to my main
> array. That would also be a viable option if someone can tell me how to
> cudgel VirtualBox into submission.
> 
> Questions welcomed.

-- 
Len Sorensen