I am in badly need a solution with my hdd died last week. And the mirrored backup hdd also went together in the same situation. I could not access to the windows. DISKPART shows that the vol 0 fs has turned to RAW (supposed to be NTFS) in which the manager data resides. The last backup was 2-month ago. All advice suggested to reactive the disk volume, but it could delete all the data. What should I do to recover the Manager data?
You could try bringing your disk drive to a specialist IT service you may be able to recover the data.
Otherwise, restore your backup of two months ago and reenter your transactions
To everyone else reading this -
You need a procedure to backup your business files regularly AND to an external storage medium (USB Key, USB Drive or Cloud storage)
Sorry to hear that because it really sucks.
For now you will have to do with @Joe91 advice. But I strongly recommend you switch to the cloud edition, backup regularly and use a backup or sharing tool like One Drive, Google Drive or MEGA.
I personally do all of those and there’s still a tiny margin for minor data loss but I can totally live with it.
Try Easus Data Recovery Software. In my experience, this has sometimes been successful. However, more often than not, it is has not been possible to recover the data as the hard drive is too damaged.
However before you do that, the very first thing you should do is invest in some kind of automated daily backup solution. Never ever run a business without a backup. You could have a fire, theft, hardware failure etc. Always, always have a daily automated backup for all your files (not just Manager) on your computer.
Second and even more important - test your backup. People have unfortunately discovered that their backup was not backing up properly and were unable to restore their data. Test restores are so important.
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Thanks guys. I downloaded the Minitool Data Recovery and recovered the manager files in the appdata\local\manager. I have installed a new Windows and placed in the same destination like in the previous. But I faced a problem here:
I installed a brand new Manager and ran natively manager.exe it reads the all businesses there in. But when I start using NSSM, when open the manager, the businesses were missing.
I stopped the NSSM and returned to the manager.exe, the businesses appeared again. How do I get all the businesses via NSSM?
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The default application data directory is in a sub directory of the user actually running Manager. If you run Manager from a different user, a different application data directory will be used by default.
The lowest tech solution is
- open your desktop Manager and backup your businesses
- open for server Manager and import your businesses
Alternatively you could copy the contents of the application data directory.
@success127 the cost of this IT error has been relatively low this time. Given the questions you are asking and issues you are having, I believe the overall cost to you would be lower if you paid the cloud subscription
What I am not hearing is what plans you have put in place to prevent this from happening again? I work in IT and I can tell you that the success rate for software data recovery from hard drives is very low. Far too often the hard drive is too damaged physically and the only way you can get data is to send it off to a specialist where they charge ÂŁ1000 per GB or something like that.
Backup your computer, not just Manager.
Appreciate your kind concern about the plans I need to have to prevent this from happen again.
Honestly, I am not a technological guy. Just have basic knowledge of here and there. The system was previously set up with the computer management with a mirror RAID 1 and data was backup with WD My Cloud PR4100 using a scheduler program to schedule a daily backup of users’ data. Of course, the schedule also assigned to copy the user\appdata\local\manager folders to the external backup as well. Once in a while, I would click on the backup button of the Manager to download to my computer. It was also my fault, I never monitored that scheduler program that supposed to its things. These few days of all the problems, I discovered the scheduler program failed and the last backup was Dec 2020.
Back to the computer hard disk, when it failed, I disconnected it and swapped the mirrored one which supposed to be the secondary flex as indicated. It ran and we had lots of going on, and not long after that, the mirrored Windows died as well just like the main hard disk. It was very weird. I presumed it must be the virus that might have inflected the main hard disk and was mirrored to the secondary flex hard disk. I might be wrong.
If you insist on an answer on what course of action next, I would appreciate it if you could offer some solutions. I really don’t know. Much of these incidents a lesson to learn – as you said “Backup your computer, not just Manager.” And I’m sure, nothing is perfect and cannot overly expecting things to function automatically even if it was meant to be that way.
For the latest information, I have recovered back the Manager files. The ones in user\appdata\local manager folder do not read when I reinstalled the Manager. They are in hex numbering files. Read in the guide in the Manager website of the newer file name system. I did a scan and discovered the latest data were saved in windows\system32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Manager folder. That saved the day!
The reason why I am asking is because I have seen more than once, someone lose their data, manage to recover it and then a year later lose it again! Complacency sets in unfortunately. Once they have got it back, they tend to ignore the backup problem as there is always something else to spend money and time on.
Hard drives have a mtbf (mean time before failure), so the lifespan of hard drives averages means that it is not uncommon for hard drives of the same age to fail within weeks of one another if they have been in use for several years. I once saw a dozen computers all fail within weeks of one another with hard drive failures.
That’s why your mirrored drive failed so soon after the main one.
Backup Software that uses Windows scheduler - which I think is what you are saying here - has always been very unreliable and many people have found to their cost that the backup was not running. You need a backup program that runs as a service, not using Windows Scheduler. Windows Scheduler is not reliable unfortunately.
What you need is a backup program that runs as a service and secondly (and more importantly) emails you a notification every day so that you know the backup software is running and backing up your data. You also need a backup program that is air gapped - i.e. not backing up to a plugged in hard drive. If you get hit with a virus that encrypts all your data, the ransomware malware also tries to wipe your backups on external hard drives or network shares using UNC paths etc. The backup location needs to be completely independent of your network as it work - no plugged in hard drive or mapped network drive for the backup.
Also every 3 months, you should do a test restore of some sample data.
I can’t recommend anything because I deal more with enterprise level backup which would not be suitable for a home environment.