Where did my files go?

[Shamus]

After a series of bonehead changes to my Unraid, I have lost many older folders and files on a single share in a single subdirectory. My array is four disks, three data and one parity. All three disks are used by the share in question, and all three still contain at least some files and folders on the share. So it's not as if I completely whacked the share, or deleted/moved specific files from the share subdirectories. But all files older than mid-2021 in one share's (the capital U share in the diagnostics) top-level directory and it's subdirectories are gone. It's as if some automated process scanned the directory, identified things more than about one year old, and removed them. I am perplexed.

 

Any thoughts on the above, and if there is a prayer of my recovering any of this missing data, would be appreciated.

unraidserver-diagnostics-20220512-1705.zip

[Frank1940]

Do you know enough Unix/Linux to use the   ls -al   command?  This can be a powerful tool to investigate these types of events.  

 

You could also use the   mc   file manager.

 

Since you doing "a series of bonehead changes to my Unraid", you might have made a classic mistake of creating two folders with names like this   media  and   Media     The problem with this is that many OS's (e.g., Windows) will only see one of them...

[trurl]

10 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

creating two folders with names like this   media  and   Media

Don't see any evidence of this in diagnostics.

 

Another possibility is the classic mixing user shares and disk shares when moving/copying files. That would typically result in zero-length files though.

 

Maybe you accidentally moved them into another folder. Not uncommon with drag-drop.

 

 

[Frank1940]

8 minutes ago, trurl said:

Don't see any evidence of this in diagnostics.

The O.P. indicated that the problem was within a share. 

 

9 minutes ago, trurl said:

Another possibility is the classic mixing user shares and disk shares when moving/copying files.

What @trurl is talking about, you can find described here:

 

      https://forums.unraid.net/topic/32836-user-share-copy-bug/#comment-316512

 

[trurl]

12 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

The O.P. indicated that the problem was within a share. 

OK

12 hours ago, Shamus said:

single share in a single subdirectory

Which user share?

[Shamus]

On 5/13/2022 at 6:11 AM, trurl said:

Which user share?

The capital 'U' share. I am using it as a document archive for bill payments and such.

 

I was hoping that the data might still be on the disks, just somehow hidden from Unraid but still recoverable. I've used the GUI and ls command line to look at the data disk contents and they agree. I also compared disk usage from the Unraid GUI and by running du and df -h commands and these seem to agree as well. So assuming Unraid is and the ls commands are showing everything on the disks, the data is gone from Unraid.

 

Luckily, I copied most of this data from another NAS about six months ago, and I still have one of the two mirrored disks on hand. It had its file system wiped, but I used a tool called Disk Drill and it looks like I can recover most of the missing files. There will be work to be done to rename and reorganize the files, but better than a complete loss. My time and about $90 for the Disk Drill license is sounding like the best option.

 

Thanks all for the responses. I don't have any real hope for finding my missing files on the Unraid disks, so I think we can consider this topic closed.