Starline saves documentary ensemble from total loss in archive

Comprehensive advice and straightforward sales are important when it comes to IT products - but things only get really great when the support also works perfectly - especially years later. This is what happened in Berlin. On the way to the seven-year anniversary, the RAIDset of the award-winning Antje Starost Film Produktion got hit. And Starline skillfully helped out.

The filmmakers Antje Starost and Hans Helmut Grotjahn, plagued by bad news, reached Starline Support in September 2023 via detours. They had previously consulted quite a few experts, dealers - even manufacturers - without success in order to save the contents of their RAID system: It contained terabytes of award-winning documentaries, Avid projects and cut lists dating back to the 1980s.

The problem: Suddenly all data had disappeared. The RAID system had simply lost the RAID sets. The twelve hard disks, each with a capacity of 10 terabytes, which were actually protected via RAID6, showed up in the web GUI as responsive and okay, but empty. This was the greatest possible inconvenience for the filmmakers. Especially since the International Hof Film Festival was just around the corner and the current film had not yet been finalized.

First point of attack: log files read out by script from the Areca system in question were to provide clarity. Unfortunately, this procedure came to nothing without any further findings. Next point of attack: Rescue RAIDset. This command tries to assemble a RAIDset from the information available on the disks. This attempt was also unsuccessful.

Note: All of the selected measures were chosen carefully and were not meant to corrupt existing data.

„Thank you very much for your help, which led to a happy ending that we no longer believed in.”

Antje Starost, producer, writer and director

However, Starline veteran Konrad Beyer still had an ace up his sleeve with this Areca controller. He checked whether the drives in the system were still in exactly the same order as when they were delivered in 2017. This was given since no hotspare disk had been configured.

Therefore, there was a very high probability that the RAIDset could be revived by rewriting the RAIDset information to the disks. To do this, the technical manager configured the original RAID level 6 noted in the order with default settings - but without initializing the RAIDset in the process (and thus deleting the existing data from the disks), as is normally the case.

Bingo: In one fell swoop, all the data was back, the filmmakers were overjoyed, and all the footage - historically important interviews, labor-intensive cut lists, and irretrievable original files - was saved.

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How can we help you?

Since 1981, Antje Starost Film Produktion has primarily developed its own original material, produced screenplays and feature films: Documentaries, essay and hybrid forms, children's films and short feature films.
Hans Helmut Grotjahn and Antje Starost form the core team, always open to new ideas and fields of activity. Distribution and sales for own productions (Starost Film Verleih und Vertrieb), film presentation, DVD edition and marketing.

Any questions?

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Konrad Beyer

Technical Support

Our technical manager has a comprehensive knowledge of all storage and server topics.