I’ll make it short:
Apparently relying on a 4-way mirror for my most important backups wasn’t enough. Every single hard drive from the 4-way mirror failed(?) simultaneously. They aren’t even recognized by fdisk anymore.
Because this sounds so incredible to me as well, I question if this could happen the way it seems it happened.
I’m all good as long as I can clone or access hard drives at all. If they don’t even show up with fdisk, it’s another story.
I excluded adapters and cables as a source of error. Everything that was connected to the hard drives works flawlessly with a different HDD pool.
Glad to hear your problem was solved @Akito. But for some of us less techincial, could you explain a 4-way mirror (is it 4 disks all kept in sync?) and was was it only one HDD that went bad? And replacing the bad HD solved your problem. The software re-sync with the new disk drive.
I think following resources should help you understand:
mirror
A mirror of two or more devices. Data is replicated in an
identical fashion across all components of a mirror. A mirror with
N disks of size X can hold X bytes and can withstand (N-1) devices
failing before data integrity is compromised.
After all, it indeed was only one HDD that went bad.
Did not find a replacement yet, but I’m working on it. Maybe I will change the setup of this mirror entirely, as I use a new Backup-of-the-Backup system now, anyway.
Thanks for the Ton of info. I was not looking to install this type of configuration on my home PC. I know how Raid and a mirrored disk works. I had not hear of a 4-way mirror. I was thinking maybe it was just 3 copies of the same disk meaning you had 4 disks with the same info on them. Maybe that’s too simple of a way to thinking of it. And of course, if one disk went bad, no problem. You still have original disk plus 2 copies.