Been using godaddy for my dedicated server for a few months now. Apparently the reason the server has become inaccessible is because they needed to replace the drives and once they did that they said the kernel panicked and needed a reprovision and wanted to charge me $150 per drive for an external USB backup.

Now they've attached the external USB which contains a backup of my file system supposively, and reprovisioned the server, but I can't figure out how to access the backup(s).

I've SSH'd into the server and have tried various commands such as /sbin/fdisk -l which I've read online will show me various things. I've also gone a step further and tried to mount each of those into a location, but after changing to the directory that should contain the mounted drive I don't see anything that resembles a file system.

Can anyone assist me or tell me how to access this external USB? They're horrible at providing service and I just want to get my files and databases so that I can move to a new server.

Thanks in advance for any assistance in providing commands or concepts, etc.

---------- Post added 06-28-12 at 06:30 PM ----------

Btw the OS is CentOs

For you $150, GoDaddy should darn well tell you how to access the data.

I have a feeling that there's more to this, but I do know that, in the eyes of many hosting providers, if customer has a VPS or a dedi, it is the customer's responsibility to see to backups, since the customer has, for all intents and purposes, full control of the machine and the right to do things that the provider might recommend against.

But you paid for this backup and I would expect them to be willing to assist you to access it.

Well each time I've wanted them to assist me with figuring out why the server isn't working, they've requested a $50 investigation fee. At that point I would complain about how long I was a customer and how it's pointless to continue being a paid customer if I can't use my server and they would waive the fee. They did the same thing for this $150 fee per drive, however after it was all said and done the backup on /mnt/disk3 turned out to be blank because they said something about missing partitions so everything was lost anyway, which makes me even more glad I didn't pay $150 per drive and even more reason to leave Godaddy as I've never had as many problems with hosting as I've had through them. Thanks for trying to help.

The USB enclosure would not contain a backup of your content but the hard drive you originally had in the server. If the hard drive was already failing when you had to replace it for the reprovision it is possible you would not be able to recover any data from the failed drive.

Should anyone else need this information in the future, the following commands should allow you to mount your USB drive and must be run via SSH as the root user:

First enter the /dev directory:

cd /dev

If you only have one drive on your server or 2 drives in RAID you should use sdb3 to mount your USB drive, and if you have two drives on your server that are not in a RAID array then your USB drive should be sdc3. To confirm this you can use the following command:

df

**This will show you drives that are already mounted.

ls sdb3


**This will show all drives currently attached to the server.

Once you have determined the nomenclature of your USB drive you can use the following commands to mount the drive:

mkdir /mnt/olddrive
mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt/olddrive

Notes: There is a space between /dev/sdb3 and /mnt/olddrive. Replace sdb3 with sdc3 if necessary.

It would appear that GoDaddy is willing to tell you how to access the drive in question.

That we are! If you did not get this information when you asked for it from our support team I would be more than happy looking into why if you would message me those details cadkins29.