Datasets dissappeared

TrueNAS General
1

A few weeks ago, I upgraded my existing server running FreeNas 9.3 to TrueNas scale 25.04.2.3. I tried with to delete old backups of my wife and my laptop computers to free up some room, with no success. It said I didn’t have the permissions. I tried to change permissions but still was not able to delete the files. In my frustration and not so infinite wisdom, I decided to delete the entire dataset and start over. It was just the Backup dataset with sub folders for wife and my backups. Now some of the other original datasets and their sub datasets now have disappeared and are not shown in the dashboard. It’s strange because I can see these sub folders on my laptop thru a SMB connection.

I am able to access most of the files but not write or delete them. When I try to give permissions to these datasets, they don’t exist. At this point I believe I really screwed something up and think the best solution may be to start over. I don’t know if there is a better solution to my problem.

My thoughts are to copy the existing data (about two terabytes) on to one of the new drives then delete the existing pool and create a new one.

I just ordered two WD red 6GB drives to replace my existing two WD 1TB drives to increase my storage capacity to 8GB (mirrored). I don’t have the physical room for two more drives in my server and I don’t want any external drives. I have an adaptor and power supply to convert one of the 6GB drives into an external USB drive to copy the data.

My initial thoughts are (once my data is copied to the new drive), leaving the existing drives as is to create the new pool, then copy the data back, then replace the drives.

Again, I’m asking, is there a better way to solve my issue?

2

WD Red Pro, correct? The WD Red is an SMR drive and will generally fail after the drive starts filling up. The SMR drive cannot handle ZFS file system.

The original WD Reds were CMR, now they are not.

I suspect your issue is ACL permissions. This is a huge change from FreeNAS 9.x I’m not a permissions person and I’m not really clear on exactly what you did. A change from FreeBSD to Linux with such a huge gap, not sure I would have tried that myself.

3

All due respect, and I may be wrong, but according to WD’s website, the Red Pro drives are CMR. Here is a Link. My old WD Red and Black drives are also CMR.

4

Are you looking up the specific model number of the WD Red?

An example.
SMR vs CMR ServeTheHome

5

@Phak1
Isn’t that what I said?

But you said you ordered WD Red drives recently. You did not state WD Red Pro so I was bringing this to light with hopes you meant the pro version.

1 Like
6

My mistake, I ordered WD Red Plus, but their website says there still CMR drives.

I’m still looking for an alternative path to fixing my server beside wiping and starting clean. Is there any shell commands to look at what datasets are currently in the pool and the permissions associated with them?

7

If you want a list of all datasets you can do the following:

sudo zfs list

If you are unsure if you accidentally deleted a dataset you can look in the zfs history for a list of all datasets that were destroyed. Use the following command:

sudo zpool history | grep destroy

Permissions are on a per-file/folder basis and cannot be easily listed. If you just want a list of all files and folders, you can use the find command to list them. If you’re root the file permissions are ignored and won’t interfere.

To list all files:
find /mnt -type f
That might be a large list, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-C to cancel the command at any time.

You mentioned you have permission problem, but could you describe that in further details?

8

That should still be true. Sorry I limited myself to saying Pro and not including Plus. That was my mistake.

We have to be careful when people by a WD NAS drive to ensure they are getting the correct recording technology.

9

When I originally setup my users permissions, I didn’t know about setting the permissions recursively which prevented me from deleting some files under my backup dataset. When I tried to change the settings, I couldn’t get it to work. I tried adding additional users to allow me to change files but with no success. As I said in my first post, I deleted the entire dataset called backups (with sub datasets for each computer). When I did this, some of my other sub-datasets disappeared in the dashboard. They seem to be there on my SMB connection on my laptop. When I try to access, Windows says I don’t have the permission.

10

Datasets really shoudn’t dissapear like that. Could you execute the commands below in the shell and copy the output here (maybe redact them if they contain private data). That way we might be able to exactly figure out what happened.

Basic Zpool Status:

sudo zpool status

List of all datasets:

sudo zfs list

List of all dataset destroy operations:

sudo zpool history | grep destroy

SMB Configuration:

sudo testparm -s
11

truenas_admin@truenas[~]$ sudo zpool status
pool: Volume1
state: ONLINE
status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool.
The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Enable all features using ‘zpool upgrade’. Once this is done,
the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support
the features. See zpool-features(7) for details.
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 06:18:25 with 0 errors on Sun Aug 10 06:18:51 2025
config:

    NAME                                                 STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    Volume1                                              ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0                                           ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-WDC_WD20EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCC4M3065639-part2   ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-WDC_WD20EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WMC4M3295260-part2   ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-1                                           ONLINE       0     0     0
        sda2                                             ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-WDC_WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0_WD-WCATRC517464-part2  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

pool: boot-pool
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:00:14 with 0 errors on Tue Sep 23 03:45:15 2025
config:

    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    boot-pool   ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
        sdf3    ONLINE       0     0     0
        sde3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
truenas_admin@truenas[~]$
truenas_admin@truenas[~]$
truenas_admin@truenas[~]$
truenas_admin@truenas[~]$ sudo zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
Volume1 1.60T 1.03T 244K /mnt/Volume1
Volume1/.system 2.91G 1.03T 136K legacy
Volume1/.system/configs-1b316f08d08541c0a0b8340c74b1b06d 161M 1.03T 161M legacy
Volume1/.system/configs-ae32c386e13840b2bf9c0083275e7941 956K 1.03T 956K legacy
Volume1/.system/cores 112K 1024M 112K legacy
Volume1/.system/netdata-ae32c386e13840b2bf9c0083275e7941 71.7M 1.03T 71.7M legacy
Volume1/.system/nfs 104K 1.03T 104K legacy
Volume1/.system/rrd-1b316f08d08541c0a0b8340c74b1b06d 144K 1.03T 144K legacy
Volume1/.system/samba4 496K 1.03T 496K legacy
Volume1/.system/syslog-1b316f08d08541c0a0b8340c74b1b06d 2.68G 1.03T 2.68G legacy
Volume1/Media 163G 1.03T 163G /mnt/Volume1/Media
Volume1/Users 1.44T 1.03T 1.44T /mnt/Volume1/Users
boot-pool 2.81G 105G 96K none
boot-pool/ROOT 2.80G 105G 96K none
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3 2.80G 105G 176M legacy
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/audit 1.11M 105G 1.11M /audit
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/conf 7.14M 105G 7.14M /conf
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/data 280K 105G 280K /data
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/etc 7.53M 105G 6.54M /etc
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/home 116K 105G 116K /home
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/mnt 96K 105G 96K /mnt
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/opt 96K 105G 96K /opt
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/root 136K 105G 136K /root
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/usr 2.56G 105G 2.56G /usr
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/var 48.4M 105G 5.12M /var
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/var/ca-certificates 96K 105G 96K /var/local/ca-certificates
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/var/lib 27.6M 105G 27.3M /var/lib
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/var/lib/incus 96K 105G 96K /var/lib/incus
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/var/log 14.7M 105G 4.08M /var/log
boot-pool/ROOT/25.04.2.3/var/log/journal 10.6M 105G 10.6M /var/log/journal
boot-pool/grub 8.42M 105G 8.42M legacy
truenas_admin@truenas[~]$ sudo zpool history | grep destroy
2025-09-06.17:30:58 zfs destroy -r Volume1/jails
2025-09-10.18:29:25 zfs destroy -r Volume1/Backups
2025-09-10.18:33:50 zfs destroy -r Volume1/Backups
2025-09-23.17:45:14 zfs destroy -r Volume1/Users/phil
2025-09-23.17:46:15 zfs destroy -r Volume1/phils_pool
2025-09-23.17:49:41 zfs destroy -r Volume1/Media/Music_Video
2025-09-06.10:11:41 zfs destroy -r boot-pool/.system
truenas_admin@truenas[~]$ sudo testparm -s
Load smb config files from /etc/smb4.conf
Loaded services file OK.
Weak crypto is allowed by GnuTLS (e.g. NTLM as a compatibility fallback)

Server role: ROLE_STANDALONE

Global parameters

[global]
bind interfaces only = Yes
disable spoolss = Yes
dns proxy = No
load printers = No
logging = file
max log size = 5120
passdb backend = tdbsam:/var/run/samba-cache/private/passdb.tdb
printcap name = /dev/null
registry shares = Yes
restrict anonymous = 2
server multi channel support = No
server string = TrueNAS Server
winbind request timeout = 2
zfs_core:zfs_block_cloning = False
zfs_core:zfs_integrity_streams = False
idmap config * : range = 90000001 - 100000000
rpc_server:mdssvc = disabled
rpc_daemon:mdssd = disabled
fruit:zero_file_id = False
fruit:nfs_aces = False
idmap config * : backend = tdb
create mask = 0664
directory mask = 0775

[Phil]
comment = Phil’s Files
ea support = No
level2 oplocks = No
oplocks = No
path = /mnt/Volume1/Users/Phil/%U
read only = No
smbd max xattr size = 2097152
vfs objects = streams_xattr shadow_copy_zfs ixnas zfs_core io_uring
fruit:resource = stream
fruit:metadata = stream

[Karen]
comment = Karen’s Files
ea support = No
level2 oplocks = No
oplocks = No
path = /mnt/Volume1/Users/Karen
read only = No
smbd max xattr size = 2097152
vfs objects = streams_xattr shadow_copy_zfs ixnas zfs_core io_uring
fruit:resource = stream
fruit:metadata = stream

[Music]
ea support = No
path = /mnt/Volume1/Media/Music
posix locking = No
read only = No
smbd max xattr size = 2097152
vfs objects = streams_xattr shadow_copy_zfs ixnas zfs_core io_uring
fruit:resource = stream
fruit:metadata = stream

[Videos]
ea support = No
path = /mnt/Volume1/Media/Videos
posix locking = No
read only = No
smbd max xattr size = 2097152
vfs objects = streams_xattr shadow_copy_zfs ixnas zfs_core io_uring
fruit:resource = stream
fruit:metadata = stream

[Video]
ea support = No
path = /mnt/Volume1/Media/Videos
posix locking = No
read only = No
smbd max xattr size = 2097152
vfs objects = streams_xattr shadow_copy_zfs ixnas zfs_core io_uring
fruit:resource = stream
fruit:metadata = stream

[Users]
ea support = No
path = /mnt/Volume1/Users
posix locking = No
read only = No
smbd max xattr size = 2097152
vfs objects = streams_xattr shadow_copy_zfs ixnas zfs_core io_uring
fruit:resource = stream
fruit:metadata = stream
truenas_admin@truenas[~]$

12

So it looks like you deleted the Backups dataset on the 10th. Three days ago you also deleted Users/phil phils_pool and Media/Music_Video. Looks like the latter two weren’t shared via SMB. The first one Users/phil was shared via SMB.

All other shares looks fine, both Volume1/Media and Volume1/Users are still there and mounted. ZFS reports about 1.6TB of used space.

Can you name the datasets which disappeared? Which shares do you have trouble accessing? If permissions seem to be an issue, there is an option to reset the permissions of all files in a dataset, that might help you out.

13

The Backups dataset I deleted on the 10th was the one that started the whole mess. The next two, Users/phil phils_pool and Media/Music_Video. were datasets I created, trying to figure out permissions, so I deleted them so I didn’t add to the confusion.

On the dashboard under Datasets all I see is two named Media and Users. There are sub Datasets under Media called Music and Video and Under Users, there are sub Datasets called Karen, Phil and Phak. Are these supposed to show the sub datasets? I can see them under users when I expand the tree and under Windows explorer.

The share I cannot access is my own folder called Phil. Windows denies access to it. I can access the folder under another share called Users which is the parent to folders Phil, Karen and PHIL-PC, a share I created trying to understand permissions.

I added a few photos of my dashboard hoping this will help.

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14

Thanks for the photos, they do help a lot.

I see that you are confused about the difference between datasets and folders. That is a common source of confusion.

You only have two datasets, as shown in the dataset list. These are called Media and Users. Technically you have one more dataset, the root dataset, which is the parent dataset of Media and Users.

Files and Folders live inside a dataset. When you look at the directory tree in your screenshots you can see a different symbol for datasets and folders. For example /mnt/Volume1/Media is a dataset (marked with the file drawer symbol), where as /mnt/Volume1/Music and /mnt/Volume1/Videos are regular folders (marked with a folder symbol).

Your permission on /mnt/Volume1/Users/Phil look good. Please note that you also require directory-traversal permission on all parent folders as well.

It’s possible that filesystem permissions are not the issue. Use the following command to check if filesystem permissions are the issue:

sudo -u phil ls -al /mnt/Volume1/Users/Phil

If you can see directory contents then the filesystem permissions are good.

In case file system permissions are the problem, please post the output of the following commands. That would allow us to check for permissions errors:

sudo ls -ld /mnt/Volume1/Users/Phil
sudo nfs4xdr_getfacl /mnt/Volume1/Users/Phil
sudo ls -ld /mnt/Volume1/Users
sudo nfs4xdr_getfacl /mnt/Volume1/Users
sudo ls -ld /mnt/Volume1
sudo nfs4xdr_getfacl /mnt/Volume1
15

It looks like my file system permissions are good as I can see folders and files. I did a screen print to show you.

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I am a bit confused on Datasets and folders. Where do the folders get created, in Windows or thru the dashboard?

16

Looking back at your SMB config, it seems like you have set the Option “Use as Home Share”.

In the Web UI, please go to Shares Page. Edit the “Phil” Share and make sure to uncheck the option “Use as Home Share”.
image

To your question: Datasets are created on the Datasets page in the Web UI. Folders are typically created via Network Share (“Windows”). Sometimes FreeNAS will create folders for you, for example if you create a user and set a home directory.

17

I checked and that box is not checked.

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18

Maybe you have a path suffix of “%U” instead?

Check that this field is empty.

image
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19

Also check your share purpose, it should be “Default share parameters”.

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20

Fantastic! That was it. It was populated with ”%U”. I can now access the files.

Any idea how that would get populated, so I don’t make that mistake again?

One last question. If you look at the picture, there are two folders that I created (PHIL-PC & phak) while experimenting in freenas 9.3, that I don’t need. How do I make them disappear? If I should start a new post for this question, please let me know.

I thank you immensely for your patience and your help!

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