More likely than not you have been alerted to your failed RAID by means of an email from the RAID controller or perhaps a fault light is flashing on the front of the controller itself.

Your first instinct is of course to check that you can still access your data. Assuming that you still can do so then there is absolutely no need to panic, you just must make sure that you do not ignore it and act now. Note that by “being able to access your data” it is important to understand that simply being able to see your data listed (say via Windows Explorer for example) is not enough to be sure. Seeing your data listed is like seeing the index for a book, the fact that you can see a file list does not necessarily mean that the data is still there. To be sure- try opening a large size file (at least 500KB). If this opens Ok then it is very likely that the rest of your data is OK.

From here I suggest that you firstly backup any particularly critical data to an outside location such as a portable hard drive before you follow your RAID controller’s instructions for replacing the failed drive and re-building the RAID array. This is advisable because we see a lot of RAIDs for recovery that have suffered additional failures during the process of re-building the RAID after the first failure. This can leave the RAID in an intermediate state from which it is virtually impossible to recover your data without the need for expensive RAID data recovery.

Even when it is in the hands of professionals it can be difficult to extract the data from a half re-built storage volume. But is you have followed the advice of first backing-up to a second location then you can laugh in the face of fate on this one.

Related posts:

1. Complete The Protection of Your Data With The Help of Data Recovery Freeware
2. An Introduction To Zip Disk Data Recovery
3. Formatted Data Recovery Made Simple
4. Data Recovery After Format Of A Hard Drive
5. Backup Software Options – Saving Computer Data Locally Versus Online