Don’t know how or why copying a dataset deleted 20+ TB of data. Been using FreeNas/Truenas (24.10.1) for many years so I’m not a newbie. I wanted to copy a large amount of data to a new server to check drive performance. In MacOS 15.2 I attempted to “slide” (copy with trackpad) a large dataset containing 6 main folders to a newly created dataset on the new server. Many windows started to popup instead of the copy dialog I was expecting. These seem to be transfer windows? I closed them all except the original dataset window which now contained only two of the six sub-folders. At first I thought the SMB shares were messed up. I deleted the SMB share for the dataset and attempted to recreate the share. The SMB share dialog only showed the two surviving folders. I had no recourse but to rollback the prior days snapshot. This was unexpected behavior and caused 20+TB of data to vanish or become unusable. I’m posting this the morning after as I’m still a bit traumatized even though the server is replicated every night to another server.
Maybe you moved instead of copy?
It’s possible… Again I used the trackpad to slide the folders into the new server dataset. This should be copy as it’s on a different server. Just looked up gestures… may have used 3 fingers to move files. Still these file were gone in 5 sec max. Lesson learned.
“Slide two fingers right, up, right to suspend the laptop. Slide two fingers right, up, slightly down with the last stroke as you move to the right… to launch the nukes.”
I love gestures!
I never use them.
I’m surprised something so massive happened so quickly, even if you did a move.
Did you verify that the data was truly gone by sshing to the server and looking at the datasets manually?
No… But after deleting the SMB share I reshared the dataset. The drop down directory tree only showed the two remaining subdirs. If the data was still there it was inaccessible with the GUI. You are correct that It would have taken some time to delete all that data. I should have restarted the server to see if that would fix it. Praise be the snapshot ability of ZFS. “So let it be written - so let it be done”
For others, setup snapshots now!
