Need help recovering shares without backup USB

[James Dietrich]

I recently had my array suffer a power outage where my USB boot drive apparently suffered errors. I went to restore it from a backup copy to a new device, but the backup folder I ostensibly saved my usb backup was empty.

 

I was able to create a new USB stick with my credentials on it and boot the array, but it shows up as a list of unassigned disks. It looks like all disks survived and report correctly, and two of six disks are still marked parity. How do I re-assign the disks such that my shares are re-built, knowing I don't have a working backup .cfg to tell me how each disc was assigned? 

[itimpi]

Do you have any idea about how the drives were assigned (and which wad parity1 and which was parity2)?

 

Shares are simply the amalgamation of the top level folders on each drive.   Unraid will automatically create share entries for each top level folder it finds and give it default settings.

[James Dietrich]

Never mind, I guess: I read further and found the instructions on how to identify the parity drives. I re-configured the array drives and left "parity is valid" unchecked. It's rebuilding parity now, on the correct drives, and all my shares are available, apparently (although I'm going to leave the whole thing alone until parity is re-built). My whole worry was making sure I didn't trigger a data re-build from bad or mismatched parity data. Thanks for looking out, though. 

 

For anyone else that loses a USB AND the backup, and all you need to do is re-mount your existing shares in the array without writing over them from bad parity/drive mismatches, read to the bottom of this page:
https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Changing_The_Flash_Device

Doing this will start your shares array up again, but trigger a parity data rebuild. The key is identifying the parity drive(s) and assigning them correctly to parity slots before you start the array. If you put a parity drive in a data slot, or trigger a rebuild of your data from mismatched parity, you absolutely destroy data, so the important thing is to identify parity drives first, then start the array with parity drives in parity slots and leave "parity is valid" UNCHECKED.

Edited April 3, 2022 by James Dietrich