The great Imaging

An overly grand name for me taking all of the hard drives I have used over the years and creating images of them so I can actually find and access the data. It’s roughly 30 odd drives from ranging in size from 20gb IDE drives to 2tb SAS drives. Which I have been doing the totally responsible thing and stacking them in the box I use as a door stop. I’m about 1/3 of the way through imaging all of the drives. The workflow I have concocted is to use dd and pipe it into the parallel version of gzip. I’m not really looking at the data on the drives I’m just backing each drive up and storing it for later. I’ll spend sometime later decompressing and organizing all of it later the goal right now is to just get it stored into a central location. Quite a few drives were apart of old raid arrays so that will be a project in and of itself to see if any of it is recoverable. I’ve run into a minor issue with the netapp box I’m using to hold the array. It’s current location is at the foot of my bed and well it sounds like a mini jet engine. I didn’t use to mind the sound having went through high school sleeping next to a large dell server but now it is a dull drone burrowing into the deepest part of my mind. So until it can be relocated the data I have worked so hard to collate and make easy to access will require me to do a long startup process followed by a remount and data scrub.