Little deaths 4kb at a time
September 23, 2009 9:27 AM   Subscribe

Is my data gone? Convoluted data storage question involving two Macs, a Drobo, and some file permission errors... Question on possible recovery options, and questions on how to stop it from happening again.

I have recently switched to a mostly Mac household, with one Windows XP machine and one Windows laptop still around.

For data storage I picked up a Drobo and put in 3 1TB disks on it. I have it hooked to a Mac Mini on the network so it can be used for data storage. I have been moving files off my primary machine (a Macbook Pro) to the Drobo when space was needed on my hard drive.

I have gone back to get some of that data and I cannot get to it. I get the error message:

Item "itemName" is used by Mac OS X and cannot be opened.

I have tried opening these files from my Macbook Pro, from the Mac Mini where the Drobo is directly connected, I've tried moving the files to a new location, opening the files, etc. and I keep getting that same message.

I have checked and even reset all the file permissions to ensure my account does have rights but still the file won't open.

Now it appears many of the files are only 4k or 8k making me think that something went wrong. I'm guessing these files are names only taking up the minimum possible space on the disk and that my data is gone...is that right?

But I don't know if something went wrong when moving the data to the Drobo, when just being stored on the Drobo, or something else. Has anyone encountered anything like this at all?
posted by arniec to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
How did you copy the files to the Drobo? In Finder, or using Time Machine, or some other way?

Is the timestamp on the files correct?
posted by brool at 11:54 AM on September 23, 2009


Response by poster: They were copied using Finder and the time/date stamps do appear correct... They've been on the Drobo for a while so it's a gues
posted by arniec at 12:07 PM on September 23, 2009


How is the file system on the Drobo formatted? FAT-32? NTFS? Mac OS Extended (HFS+)?
posted by mrbarrett.com at 12:46 PM on September 23, 2009


Response by poster: HFS+
posted by arniec at 1:39 PM on September 23, 2009


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