I had moved a few years ago and finally found my NAS boxes. Priorities I guess. Anyway, the USB drive was corrupted to the point the system would not boot at all, checksum failed errors everywhere. I pulled the one from my 2nd FreeNAS box and the system booted up, but the volume containing the data is identified but is also showing as being empty.
Can someone recommend a data recovery software that can be ran as an ISO on the computer itself to search for lost files? I have such tools for single drives, but not one for this. I would rather run it from the box, and have it save off any recovered files via closed network.
Your choice is between Klennet ZFS Recovery and UFS Explorer RAID Recovery, running from Windows or, for the latter Linux or macOS. No ISO. Scanning is free but for actual recovery, youāll needa paid licence and enough storage.
Basics first: Which āUSB driveā? (I suspect a boot device.)
Which version of FreeNAS/TrueNAS?
How is the data pool laid out?
Give us as much information as possible. zpool import zpool status gpart list (or lsblk equivalent from SCALE)
The only software that can to some extent recover files from a dead ZFS pool is Klennet, which is pretty costly. What exactly makes you believe you cannot recover the pool by importing etc.? If you tried what error messages did you get?
My apologies, life got in the way. So, when I say that ti is empty, I mean that there is pretty much nothing left.
It is an 4 drive pool, and there is nearly 7TB free with only 1 being used.
I need to run a data recovery to attempt to recover what else was there. I upgraded FreeNas to a clean13 as the old USB volume was too corrupt to do anything with, including just doing a in place upgrade.
That is why I need a recovery software that can pull data using a surface scan.
I hope someone has some ideas. Would it be possible to make full sector images of the individual drives and then assemble those externally as mountable virtual drive or something? I find it hard to believe that no one has encountered a need for this before.
Klennet advertises itās able to recover deleted files.
Edit: I will say that while Klennet ZFS Recovery (now discontinued) advertised that capability, itās not specifically mentioned in the current Klennet Recovery product that ZFS Recovery was supposedly integrated into.
@dan Thanks for that. I had completely missed the UFS Explorer RAID Recovery reference. As I mentioned, life got in the way. I have emailed them. I donāt care much for the idea of having to put my system in an always on connection to Russia.
ZFS data loss due to human mistakes have happened all the time.
People plan accordingly and have a full backup, just in case.
I have recovered data from NTFS and itās not perfect, but because it is a very well known filesystem, used by all big companies, many people/companies have spent lots of time, money and effort in disaster recovery āsolutionsā.
We do not have such āundeleteā tools for ZFS (zdb and others help with corruption or ZFS issues, but not with deleted or overwritten data).
Given the technical nature of ZFS, most ZFS users thread lightly on it, until they feel comfortable, but the main thing again, is having a backup, of the backup.
(I get it that sometimes you canāt do that. Thatās when you start slowly by testing other (test) data, before the plunge).
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