Well my name is stupid... What happened. I was doing a massive upgrade to my unraid server and instead of being smart and doing things properly I got drunk and yoloed it.... we now I'v gotten burned. 

I had 4 12TB drives with no parity and I stuffed full of my data from a bunch of old 3TB drives. I deleted the config, ya I know im stupid, and created a new array from scratch. I thought I had selected 2 of the new empty drives to use for parity but no, I somehow selected one of the original 4 12 TB drives that was packed full of my data.... I realized this mistake after about 2% of the parity sync was done and I stopped the array. That is where I sit know. since I don't have a valid parity drive from before I cant just put things back the way they where and rebuild the bad data disk.

My question is what can I do. I know I'm not going to get everything back from this drive. But is there any way to recover some of the data? I have not and will not touch anything until I hear from the community. I just hope this was not the drive with my photo folders on it... everything but the photos can be replaced... 

I'm just shaking my head has I preach to other people about 3-2-1.... I do have an off site backup of my important photos but they on google photo using there compressed format.  

 

I would think your best chance is to use something like UFS explorer under Windows to see what data it can find on the drive.    It would take sometime as you have certainly bad;y damaged the file system control structures that are at the start of the disk so the whole disk will have to be scanned looking for potential files.
 

The trial version of UFS explorer can be used for free and that would at least let you know what it might be able to recover, but you have to pay to use the version that will recover any useful data as the trial version has a file size limit on files it can recover.

 

others may have other suggestions for recovery software but that is the only one that I have experience of using.

 

worth re-iterating the point (which I think you recognise) that Unraid should never be considered as an alternative to having a proper backup strategy for important data - there are all sorts of ways to lose data other than drive failures.

@itimpi. Thank you for the suggestion, ill look i to that software in the morning.

 

If you can believe it, I was doing this upgrade so I can take the old drives and build a small unraid box and store it remotely at the in-laws house. Then setting us all up to backup to our local inroad box and then have diff backups remotely.

Edited February 9, 20215 yr by amducious

@itimpi no go with the UFS explorer came back and said no files found.... I'm surprised with this but it is what it is. anyone have any other ideas?

Hmm now that I'm thinking about this, I had set the drive for passthrough and just added it to a windows VM for scanning. would this change the results? I'm not 100% sure how passthrough works for non pci devices. 

I didnt want to but I might just rip the drive out and pop it into another computer and scan again. 

 

Edited February 12, 20215 yr by amducious

6 hours ago, amducious said:

@itimpi no go with the UFS explorer came back and said no files found.... I'm surprised with this but it is what it is. anyone have any other ideas?

Hmm now that I'm thinking about this, I had set the drive for passthrough and just added it to a windows VM for scanning. would this change the results? I'm not 100% sure how passthrough works for non pci devices. 

I didnt want to but I might just rip the drive out and pop it into another computer and scan again. 

 

When you used UFS Explorer did you make sure that it treated the drive as the format it was BEFORE you used it as parity?    If I remember correctly that was XFS.?   If you did then it sounds as if too much damage was done to allow for any recovery.