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I am an amateur photographer and recently decided it was time to stop using external hard drives and move to a custom built storage server. This build was mostly for fun and learning.

I started by buying two 6TB Seagate IronWolf drives and placing them on my current editing machine, as I am purchasing the pieces when I have some money to spare, and it will take a while. As I manage all my data through Google Drive, I created a RAID 0 using Windows's Storage Spaces feature and put my Google Drive directory there, so it started to back up my 12TB RAID.

Apparently did not read enough on software RAID as we had a power outage and when Windows came back from rebooting, my RAID was nowhere to be seen.

Did I lose everything? Part of the data is safe and sound on Google Drive and Google Cloud Storage — and the external hard drives that had them before —, but a good part of my 2018 photo shoots were still being uploaded, including my Lightroom catalog.

Usually, it would not bother me that much as I could just reshoot those, but Murphy's Law and all, the RAW files I lost are from paid customers.

So did I lose everything? I did not disconnect the drives to see if or which one is damaged, but is there any way to recover the data?

This is what Windows show me when I try to use its disk utility to take a look at the disks:

Screen Shot

PS: Learn from your mistakes and all — a UPS is my next purchase.

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    Well for a short answer: If any disk in RAID 0 fails, they all fail. Not sure what your intention for using RAID 0 was, but it's definitely NOT for backups. Hopefully someone with more knowledge can shed some light for you though.
    – K.Dᴀᴠɪs
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 23:43
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    And you could possibly look into using recovery software. If the disks didn't fry then this is always an option. If the data is extremely valuable, then I would avoid the DIY option and just get a professional data recovery service to do it for you.
    – K.Dᴀᴠɪs
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 23:49
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    Sorry for your loss. Next time, RAID1 peovides reliability, RAID 0 is "fast but I don't care about my data". A data recovery specialist who works with Windows devices will most likely be able to recover your data. I believe what needs to happen is you need the OS to rediscover the array, the problem is you could make things worse if you don't know what you are doing.
    – davidgo
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 23:51
  • Have you tried going into the BIOS and seeing if there are software raid settings you can reenable there?
    – davidgo
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 23:54
  • I chose RAID 0 mostly because I wanted Windows to see only one drive instead of two, to make organization simpler.Google Drive and Google Cloud Storage were supposed to take care of backups, but the problem showed up before it had time to finish uploading the backup :(
    – user873191
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 23:54

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Ok, everything is fine now, but also peculiar and without any explanation.

After installing software to recover lost data, the RAID just came back to life. It does show a "cyclic redundancy check" error when trying to access the 2018 photo shoots, but I was able to recover those files using software from EaseUS.

I still do not know why Windows randomly showed the RAID again, but all is well.

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