Newbie, I think I lost a whole drive full of data. Please Help. :(

[Randomsteve]

 

I think I have somehow lost almost 4TB of data and I don't even know how. Let me give you a little information.

 

I am 100% completely new to unraid, linux, servers, all of this. I have always been a windows guy and have been running a Nas for quite some time, I'm very techy but have never dabbled into this field. Recently I got some extra computer hardware and decided to build a little server box that could replace my NAS and maybe do a little Server work for me as well (Plex, games, the like). I have spent the last few days slowly transferring files over this Unraid box. 1 drive at a time because I did not have enough drives to do 1 big transfer. I transfer a drive over, check to make sure everything is good, format the "Old" (Less then 1 year old ironwolf drives) then install into the unraid server and start transferring another drives worth of files over. I finally got all of this completed this morning and then I went ahead and installed a 1tb M.2 SSD and another 4TB Ironwolf drive and set them up as my cache drive and parity drive and then I let the box sit there for the majority of today and work on building the parity drive. I get back home tonight and check on it and the parity drive is complete, I take a look at my array and I notice that it now says 5TB used not the 8TBs it was showing this morning. I look through my shares and sure enough an entire drives worth of data is missing.......... The other thing I noticed is that I lost my Krusader file explorer docker as well ( which is what I was having do the file transfers through a smb share). Looking at the shares and folders I believe I lost the entire first drive I had installed in there worth of data. This was a brand new drive that I just bought..............

 

 

What do I do now?

 

 

I honestly don't even know what has happened, I have been so careful about moving things over in a very organized manner double and triple checking everything. I was so happy everything moved over correctly and relieved that I could get the parity drive built finally and now it seems I have lost so much stuff that will take me months to get back if I ever even do manage to get it all back.

 

 

Is there someway for me to check and see what happened? Logs somewhere? A recycling bin of file histories or some other way of looking at these now seemingly empty drives and seeing if there was something on them? Like I said other than installing a cache drive and a parity drive and allowing parity to build today I have done nothing else, no files transfers or anything else yet...

 

 

I'm sooo bummed I honestly just feel like trashing this whole server and going back to my crap nas all of my excitement about this whole project and all of its potential is gone.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'll be here being depressed if you need me.

[itimpi]

You are likely to get better informed feedback if you attach your systems diagnostics zip file (obtained via Tools->Diagnostics) to your NEXT post.

[Randomsteve]

servertower-diagnostics-20211018-0914.zip

 

Here is that file. I will say 2 things though. 1 I did pretty much immediately shut down the server when I saw that I had lost data because I was worried about something trying to write into that free space and ruin any chances that I may have had recovering it. I understand now that I could have just stopped the array, but like I said I'm totally new to this so shut down seemed like the safest solution at the time. 

 

2 I currently don't have drive 1 attached to the server. Disk 1 is the Drive that suddenly lost all of its data. I have pulled it out of the box and plugged it into my windows pc with a powered usb adapter and have been running Raise Data recovery on it overnight. I checked it this morning and it seems to have found all of the 3tbs worth of data I lost. At this point it wants me to select a location to store this data but I don't have enough free space in computer and can't afford to buy yet another 4tb hard drive right now. I'm not sure what I should do at this point. I know for a fact that 1 of the drives in the unraid box  is totally empty but I'm afraid to touch anything and risk losing even more by screwing something else up. 

 

any ideas on what I should do?

[itimpi]

We can not tell much from the diagnostics with the array stopped, so redoing them after starting the array is better.  They are also just after a reboot so no indication what lead up to your problem - in the future if a similar problem happens then take diagnostics before shutting down your system.

 

I suspect that the original problem was that the disk in question dropped offline for some reason.  If so then when you restart the array you may find that the system is successfully emulating the missing drive and showing all the data it should contain.

[Randomsteve]

Can I start the array without that drive plugged in?

[itimpi]

2 minutes ago, Randomsteve said:

Can I start the array without that drive plugged in?

 

You should be able to since you have single parity which can handled one drive missing/failed.  Unraid will tell you if this is not possible.

[Randomsteve]

Ok, yeah it let me start the array with the 1 missing disk. It tells me device missing contents emulated. It shows Disk 1 as being completely empty like before. 

 

Disk 4 is the last disk I installed before installing the parity disk and it is totally empty. Is there an easy way for me to unmount this disk from the array so I can use it to save my recovered data to?

Edited October 18, 2021 by Randomsteve

[Randomsteve]

On second thought, Since I started the array up again can I just recover my data to it? Should I try and shrink the array and remove Disk 1 first?