September 30, 2011 2:39 AM

Myself being a photographer too, I can feel your pain. I feel really sorry for you. Years ago I was in the same situation, and I've learned from it.
Leif, don't read any further for the next two months, seriously.

All others: if you rely on your data, then its vital to understand that redundancy ensures availability, its not a backup. RAID is not a substitute for a backup, it might be a supplement if hardware failures must not affect the immediate availability of your data.
Look up Wikipedia for the keywords 'backup' and 'off-site backup', sit down and write a backup plan, practice it, monitor that you do practice it regularly, and check (I mean: test it) that your backups are intact and suitable for a full recovery.
If your business depends on those data, then make data security a part of your business continuity planning. If you don't know what that is look it up in Wikipedia too.

I'm serious about that. In this day and age data loses may be as well common as troublesome, in the future they might threaten your business and life.

September 30, 2011 12:28 PM

intermayer said: RAID is not a substitute for a backup, it might be a supplement if hardware failures must not affect the immediate availability of your data.  

Yeah, my sympathies dude. I've had plenty of customers that thought RAID is backup, and it is not. I hope you recover your files.

Lee Jones

October 1, 2011 11:00 PM

Who made the Raid tower? You may be locked out of the files, not because they're actually gone, but because the system is in a state of failure detection of some kind, waiting for the proper "next step"

I've seen my RAID array do this one time (4-drive Buffalo RAID NAS) and once I removed the offending drive, plugged in a new one, and waited about 10 hours, all the files were back.

Files can't be erased immediately, but the boot records, and/or directory entries can be screwed up, for sure. But this doesn't automatically mean "data loss" -- just stop running external programs on the device until you do more investigation of why files "seem" to disappear.

Jeff

October 3, 2011 4:26 PM updated: October 4, 2011 2:43 PM

Leif said: Just bought the Pogoplug device yesterday. Plugged it into a small portable drive to test and setup and found it to be easier than I imagined. Annoyed that the drive is always spinning (never goes to sleep) but otherwise impressed. Today I connected my 4TB RAID tower (4x2TB drives) and found that Pogoplug couldn't make it work. It showed up as a drive on my Mac sidebar but didn't actually show any files. After disconnecting it from Pogoplug and plugging it straight into my computer (MacBook Pro via firewire)...no volumes found. I ran the Mac disk utility and it sees the volume but cannot mount it. Tried several other disk utilities but nothing can restore the data. This was EVERYTHING I have from the last ten years. EVERYTHING. Tens of thousands of images. Music. Work documents. And don't give me any grief about not having a backup. It was a RAID tower...backups are built-in. The drive was working fine until I plugged it into Pogoplug.  This product SUCKS!

Hi Leif,

We're very sorry to hear about your issues with your RAID enclosure.

If you haven't already, please contact Support. Login to my.pogoplug.com and 'Submit a support ticket' using 'Help Center'.

EDIT: We just wanted to let you know we alerted the Director of Support to your issue. The entire Support team will keep an eye for your Support request.

Kind Regards,

Christopher

on behalf of the Pogoplug Team

December 27, 2011 9:39 PM

I just realized that the hard drive I connected to pogoplug is now empty! Years of music and pics. When I plugged the drive into a computer it said it needs to be formattted. I did not format. When I clicked on the drive it said corrupted and unreadable.

I just this post and was wondering if it ever worked out for this guy or should I just kiss it all goodbye?

December 28, 2011 8:04 AM

Thank you Jeff i will check it out. Support just contacted me. I reallly appreciate you responding, it has help that sinking and depressing feeling i had! Funny thing is, i have carbonite but just for my laptop and i have been listening to their commercials recently on the radio saying that they back up external hard drives!!! Maybe the God was trying to send me a message and as usual i wasn't listening properly!

February 25, 2012 8:57 PM

I today had a Seagate passport external drive with a problem not showing up and also the PogoPlug was reporting offline... I installed a new switch today and moved the PogoPlug over to it. Status indicator only lit yellow. None of the drives showed up. I saw instructions online to power the unit down unplug the USB drives, plug the unit back in then put the USB drives back... pogoplug showed back online but with no drives. I took the external HD over to a computer and one of the partitions (NTFS)was not accessible. There was aFAT32 still working fine. Ran check disk and a handful of errors were repaired and all is working now. Maybe PogoPlug engineers have some work to do addressing this problem. Is it possible to get check disk functionality in a PogoPlug? This doesn't really seem that tough to figure out...