My EX 495 stopped working properly in 2013 after I carelessly installed 3 WD 2TB Caviar Black drives, not realizing it didn't support Advanced Format drives. Unfortunately, I didn't do my homework prior to installing these drives and realized the issue after a few days when I started getting error messages and boot issues. After reading the posts on this forum and trying and failing to recover from the corrupt file system, I gave up. Luckily at the time I had just created a cloud backup of my data. Since then I have not used the EX 495.

Recently during a cloud-to-cloud transfer I lost most of my data, including all of the original data from the EX495, leaving only the copies on the original system drive and the 3 WD drives.

I removed the system drive and the other 3 drives and placed them in an external enclosure, ran chkdsk /f and can see the folders and files on the system drive in two locations: DATA:\DE\shares (~28GB) and DATA:\shares (~900GB). The files in DATA:\DE\shares are a small subset of the full data in DATA:\shares and are intact. However, the files in DATA:\shares cannot be opened. The file type, size, dates, and name/postfix are correct, but they cannot be opened. This includes all file types.

some additional information:

* WHS version: not exactly sure, but kept up with updates until mid 2013.
* System drive: original drive that came with EX495
* drives 1-3: WD 2TB Caviar Black (WD2002FAEX)
* have no recovery disk or backups of the original system
* I was using file/folder duplication, effectively using two logical volumes.

I would appreciate any help with understanding the issue and hopefully with recovering my data.

Sorry to hear, as you can see in my sig I am not a CLOUD type person and you have proved one of the reasons why.
But to your problem.
With a WinXP or Win7 pc and a usb to sata dock, you should be able to "un-hide" files and folders and see and copy your files to somewhere else.
Assuming they are not all corrupt. If indeed they are all corrupt (which I kind of doubt) you should be able to save them. If they are all really corrupt, then there is nothing I know of to fix them.

I could be wrong, but I believe the advanced format drive problem only effected the Boot/OS drive.

The usb to sata dock will come in handy in the future, I have two for moving files around.
Hope this helps.
Good Luck Let us know how it's going.

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud

Thanks Gardian. I have learned about the issues with the public cloud the hard way. I am now transitioning back to redundant home servers and a distributed family cloud.

I am using an Acomdata external enclosure for SATA to USB. Also, using a Windows 10 laptop. Is it necessary to use WinXP or Win7 machine?

Also, I see *all* the folders and files. None are hidden. Properties menu option returns all the correct file/folder attributes, but most cannot be opened. As I mentioned earlier one folder with a smaller number of files is readable, but the one with most of the content is not.

Is this a typical symptom of using incorrectly configured advanced format drives? As a last resort, should I consider using a media recover software?

I have never used an advanced format drive. But, I have a bad feeling that no software will recover those file if they are indeed corrupted. This would be the first time I have heard of files not being access because of them.

Now, if you were trying to access the backup client database, then that would make sense, as those can't be accessed, except with the recovery software for the system.
But your normal shares should be good. Very strange

The best shot at getting them back could be a win7 or win xp pc.
Win 10 is known to do some weird things when it comes to file access/permissions.
I keep and old win xp laptop around just to work with and reload these servers. It also comes in handy at work when I have to program serial devices.

WHS v1, that is the main reason to have it in my book is you can always access the files on the drives.

Good Luck, sorry to hear. I'll keep my fingers crossed for ya.....

_________________
[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
Fear the Cloud