Good morning. How are you? A few years ago, a place where I worked was using FreeNAS 11. It had several folders (I believe they were the datasets), but an update was done and TrueNAS was installed. Before the update, it wasn’t possible to back up all the folders. Two folders disappeared. At first it wasn’t important, but now these folders are needed. How would it be possible to recover them?
We would need more info on the system. Do you have snapshots enabled and can you provide examples of what is there now and what is missing? Are they just missing from file sharing like SMB or have they disappeared on the system and you don’t see them by using the command line?
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Hi! To find out what I can do, say @truenas-bot display help.
Where were those missing folders located? In a child dataset or in the root dataset?
With freenas it was possible to create and share out Folders in the root dataset. That’s no longer possible with truenas. It may be that the missing folders were created on the root dataset and have to be moved into a child dataset.
You’d have to check from an ssh session or the webshell if they’re listed or not.
I confess to you that there was no snapshot. I searched. I was looking for the snapshot and found one from 2023, when that update was made. I believe it was created automatically, as it doesn’t have a name. Is there any way to downgrade it, even after so much time? Or are these files hidden somehow? Apparently, they disappeared from the system.
What is the TrueNAS version you are on? Please provide screenshots and details on what you believe to be missing at this point and why. Describe the problem in as great of detail as you can. We can’t see your system and can only go off what is posted in the forum.
Describe the system before the update, when the update was done, etc. I can’t tell if this system was updated from FreeNAS 11 years ago and has been running all this time or it was a recent upgrade.
Details of all the hardware and pools may help. Looking for something like the Details section below my replies. Click on the Details to expand and get a description of my TrueNAS system.
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I’m not on-site right now. I haven’t worked for that company for quite some time. I only assist them with some issues (and they asked for help recovering those files). When I have access to the server again, I can take screenshots and post them here, but one thing is certain: they were working with Frenas and updated to Truenas. If you can offer any possible explanation for what might have happened, that would be helpful. As I get more information, I’ll post it here.
I will double-check and get back to you.
The output of
zpool status
zfs list
is probably the first thing you should look at and post here if you need assistance.
I’ll check it out. Thank you for replying. I’m waiting for the company to allow me access. It’s a very small company and they asked me for help.
Good evening. I appreciate everyone who has responded so far. I will be working at this company on Saturday. I’m assuming a formatting was done. As far as I remember, the hardware is a DELL server, with 3 or 4 disks for storage and one disk with the operating system. If it was formatted and new datasets were created, what could I do to recover lost data from FreeNAS?
Klennet Recovery software may be able to tell you what is possible to recover. It looks like a commercial use license is about $700 US Dollars for actually recovery usage.
You can read about it at the link below.
Define “formatted”.
If the storage pool was overwritten the data is gone.
If TrueNAS was installed anew, the data on the storage pool should be untouched in theory.
Start with the output of the two commands I told you earlier.
Kind regards,
Patrick
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I understand. Thank you.
Good morning. Tomorrow I’ll go to the company to try and recover the data. I need to be as precise as possible, as I probably only have tomorrow to solve the problem. I will test all the options suggested here on the forum. I don’t have much knowledge about TrueNAS. As far as I know, the company server has a hard drive with TrueNAS and three (or four) other hard drives for storage. They use a Dell server. If none of the suggestions work, could I replace the hard drive with TrueNAS with one containing Windows and run software to scan the hard drives and try to find the files and folders I’m looking for? Would that work?
Scanning for errors should work, accessing the files not, becaus windows can’t access zfs pools natively. Afaik there is a zfs plugin for windows but its beta at best…
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There is the Klennet Recovery software that runs on Windows and can potentially restore data from a broken ZFS pool.
Scanning is free so you can check what would be recovered, then you have to buy the license to perform the actual restore.
Replacing a hard drive with Truenas installed with one that has Windows installed could damage files on other hard drives?
Visit the link I posted and view the software manual, tutorial and screenshots to understand what the software does.
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Good afternoon. Software is a bit expensive, but it could be an option. I confess I’m a little lost. I thought about using the software (or other cheaper software), but these software programs only work on Windows, and I’m very afraid of removing the hard drive (or uninstalling TrueNAS from the boot disk and installing Windows) and causing more damage… data loss, etc.