I did a motherboard swap, backed up my config, added some drives.
I originally had a 16Tb drive on my server to start, put a lot of data in it, and decided to mirror 2x8Tb drives later, when I moved everything. I was really careful for a year until I was able to get the drives installed.
But it wouldn’t let me mirror it, you needed a new pool! OK, so I export the current pool, Wipe the 2x8Tb drives I added, aaand… the exported pool is gone, but my drives list shows the 16Tb drive having a exported pool…
What the hell do I do? I even reinstalled a previous config, and the pool is back, but the drive is offline. When I try to export the pool it vanishes, with no option to import.
I seriously need some help. My data is there, but I can’t access it! I can’t even back it up to a cold drive. i’ve been doing that for a while, but it’s just too big!
OK, so it says that the data is corrupted and damaged, so it’s unavailable. The 16Tb drive is online, but the 2 8Tb drives are missing, since I wiped them… labeled as “insufficient replicas”…
Wait, did I corrupt my main storage drive by wiping the drives added to the pool? How do I repair the drive? The data is still intact, the pool is just corrupted, so how do I get it back?
But if the option is to wipe everything and start over (from your backup, which presumably doesn’t exist?), then you may have a few other options to try first.
There’s Klennet that can search for recoverable files for free. You need to pay for a license to be able to actually restore files though.
Yeah, I just realized that… I went to fast, and didn’t read the full instructions on exporting. I wasn’t completely awake when I finished my server stuff yesterday…
But I only wiped the added drives, the pool is still saved to the main 16 Tb drive, it’s just in a corrupted status.
Thank you, I’m already looking into file recovery. That’s probably my best option.
I’ll look into it it’s possible to allow missing devices.
Thanks for all the help. I’ve been so careful not to mess with any server related stuff since I set this NAS up, I don’t know what happened to me yesterday. I just remember feeling hazy for a couple of hours up to doing this.
As I said there, I suspected you had created a stripe of single drives rather than a mirror and the screenshot confirms that this was the case. A stripe of single drives is a non-redundant pool where losing any one of the disks means that you lose the entire pool.
Then you overwrote the partitions on the 8TB drives (without attempting to remove the vDevs) and you broke the pool. I suspect that it is unlikely that your data is recoverable without using an expensive Klennet software or employing an expensive data recovery company.
@pmh I would love to help but I just stopped to get fuel and eat lunch. Then I have another 7 hours to drive. I will be offline most of the time for the next few days while helping my daughter move. She needs to find a few strong guys with a truck.
If you have a pool consisting of a single drive and then add another mirrored vdev to the pool, you will still have the single unmirrored drive and lose the pool if that one fails.
Now if the question is rather how to add a mirror to a single disk vdev - that would be the attach operation.
I think it’s “expand” in the UI, but I am not entirely sure.
Correct - notably, you have to “expand” with the original single disk highlighted. But in this case, that would require an identically sized 16T drive and not a pair of 2x8T.
@Phatoume if you have not attempted to create a new pool from the new 2x8T disks you may have a slim chance at recovery if the labels were somehow not completely overwritten by the wipe operation (but it’s likely they were) - and you may also be able to use the zfs_max_missing_tvds tunable in combination with a read-only mount, but none of these are guaranteed measures.
You can run the Klennet recovery in read-only mode without cost, to see if it can identify anything from your single 16T disk.
