delder Loc: Maryland

My observation having worked with Unineruptable power supplies for MANY years is that they usually contain surge protection as well. Affordable units are line interactive, which run on AC until power drops then switch to battery backup. Many also contain line voltage regulation as well.
Somewhat more costly [prices becoming better] are On-Line UPS power supplies. These constantly charge the battery and the Inverter runs 24/7/365 to power the load.
These often provide the more desirable Sine Wave output ad well.
These are amazing as ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happens to the load when power is lost!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

likely what happened is that you turned off the power during a write operation which corrupted the allocation table on both drives - either simultaneously or sequentially. alternately the external enclosure, power supply, cable or interface port could have failed. Hopefully you can find someone or a local professional with an alternate enclosure to try them in. If the enclosure, power supply, cable and interface are OK and you do nothing to those drives, such as formatting or writing more files to them, you may be able to recover the data by repairing the drive(s). Since I’m not a Mac Guru, let me suggest the disk repair utility built in to the Mac operating system here: https://www.macworld.co.uk/ . There may also be superior third party recovery SW - how about it Mac gurus on line?

If that fails, let’s examine your Backblaze backup. Do you have versioning set up where you can return the file system to a previous point? If so begin the download process. If you can’t implement, I suggest you either do a call or an online chat with Backblaze.

After you’ve hopefully recovered your data, we can discuss your data protection in the future. Let us know how those steps go.
BTW, DO NOT set up the new drives as RAID 0! Continue to use RAID 1.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Did this problem occur after an upgrade to BigSur?

The company said it sounds like the disks are encrypted. Did you follow up on that?

SuperflyTNT Loc: Manassas VA

RAID is never about backup. It’s all about access. Level 0 uses striping, distributing data across the drives and it’s all about speed of access. Level 1 uses mirroring and while both drives contain the same data it’s not a backup. It’s a live copy and the purpose is so the system can keep working if one drive fails. Most RAID setups are neither 0 or 1, but a higher level that uses some striping along with parity that allows swapping a drive out and rebuilding the data on it without taking the system down. Unless you’re running a system supporting multiple users or where 100% access is crucial using those RAID setups is overkill. The main reason to do it for a home system is just to combine multiple hard drives into a single virtual drive.

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

Yes, I do plan on taking the old drives to a specialist. I think I have copies of the pictures on an older external drive that is off site. I also have the best pictures and old scanned pictures on a CD. However, I don’t have my documents anywhere else. I’ll have to change that practice!

It’s very possible that a power outage caused the problem while I was away. I’m not sure about a surge/spike. I’m pretty sure that both the computer and the drive enclosure are plugged into the surge protector/batter backup. I’ll be double checking that later today.

What do you mean when you say to use my computer and not my drives for the BB backup? Currently, BB backs up both. Also, Time Machine backs up just the computer on another external drive.

I think I will keep the two new drives separate to avoid loosing both drives simultaneously again.

Thanks for all your advice.

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

No worries. I should have mentioned I was a MAC user in the initial post. Thanks!

wrangler5 Loc: Missouri

I've always been intrigued by the idea of the hot-swappable raid array, but have been put off by the high price of entry, as well as the idea that I would have all my eggs in one basket.

And at this point in this thread I'm feeling a bit smug about just using Carbon Copy Cloner (on a Mac Mini computer) to copy my external Photos drive to two separate external backup drives every morning about 3AM.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

It seems that storage and storage failures are a weekly conversation on UHH, so let me please add the following:

1) RAID systems allow the use of multiple drives to increase capacity, speed or reliability over a single drive depending on the configuration, BUT as has just been seen: (a) dual drive failures and corruption from various causes do happen and can kill all the data in a RAID array. A detailed discussion of the types of RAID configurations is a subject for a different conversation.
2) because of the above, a local backup and a backup/restore strategy that has been TESTED is a must.
3) there is a difference between a backup and an archive, but CDs, DVDs and thumb drives are not ideal media for either.
4) the third piece of your data protection is a off-site copy for disaster recovery (DR) and is critical to protect against all manner of disasters that kill both your primary copy and local backup. If you have decent internet access, a MAJOR cloud provider is the most robust system available. Lacking that, regularly exchanged off-site disks are second best.
5) finally, a NAS (network attached storage) is a storage device (often a RAID) that’s attached to the network, usually via ethernet. It may be accessed using CIFS, NFS or HTTP (for web access). Unlike server attached storage, the file system resides on the NAS. It is speed limited by the network,but may be accessed remotely IF you implement good security protocols.
6) whatever type of storage you choose, local or remote, you should incorporate versioning so you can revert your data to a previous point in time before a corruption or data loss occurred.

Hope this helps

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

I do have another Raid 1 in a hot swappable setup but the difference is that I have a third drive that I swap out monthly and keep in the safe AND I make another copy to another drive, so I actually have four copies of my pictures from 2015 to current.

The drives that failed had my older pictures, scanned pictures and documents on it. I do have other copies of the pictures and the most important documents are either in Dropbox, Google Docs or Sheets or Apple cloud.

Carbon Copy Cloner might make my life easier. One of those copies needs to be offsite.

I want to avoid a repeat failure and I really was hoping for a way to retrieve everything from the unreadable drive. I’ll have to leave that to the professionals.

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

Thank you for this detailed advice. I will definitely be changing and testing my backup system

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

I took my drives to a computer guy and I do not know if he'll be able to retrieve my data. Now I'm considering a NAS setup going forward (one that doesn't connect to the computer but rather is my own private "cloud").

JD750 Loc: SoCal

There are many ways to setup a backup system. Another option is to buy a couple hard drives and alternate them when you make backups. It’s way less complicated than a raid. Combine that with a running archive like time capsule and your pretty well covered.

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

I have multiple hard drives right now but backups are manual and I have Time Machine backing up my computer. Isn’t Time Capsule another hard drive?

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Yes. I meant Time Machine, which creates and archive which is a type of backup.