Confused about what parity did for me just now

[vw-kombi]

All my shares dissapeared.

seached here and it said to do a restart of unraid to get them back

Clean shutdown, restart - shares showing.

Disks however show my disk2 saying Unmnountable: wrong or no filesystem.  disk2 for me is part of media share with the movies only.

Check share - no movies, only TVShows - everything on non TV shows disk is gone.

No problem I thought - I have a hotspare 10TB drive in the system, stopper array, moved that into place, started aray, parity rebuild.

But - horribly, it is building the 'faulty disk' data to it - i.e the emulated contents are nothing.......

 

What did i do wrong here ?  Should I have done something different ?

I have a backup of all this stuff, but still its going to be a day to restore it all....... 

[vw-kombi]

Will this partity rebuild just rebuild the same unmountable disk issue ?

[trurl]

Parity cannot fix unmountable. You have to repair the filesystem.

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/storage-management/#drive-shows-as-unmountable

 

Attach diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread.

 

 

[vw-kombi]

So - I aborted the parity build - thinking it was not going to help, then allowed it to format the drive (which was my hot swap drive now), it still had a triangle on it and said emulated.  So I stopped the array, tools, new config, let it start the parity rebuild of that, and while its doing that, I am restoring my movied to that disk 2.

 

Looking for some direction in what I 'should' have done here, but I guess I panicked as I dont have a load of time as I am going overseas soon and needed this back up.

[vw-kombi]

Sorry - posts passed in the night - diagnostics here - but I guess its after the fact now as the 'failed' disk is now no longer part of the array.

tower-diagnostics-20230911-1221.zip

[vw-kombi]

OK - I read up on this now - thanks @trurl.

I guess I have been using unraid for so long (8+ years) without ever having seen this, so I rushed into it.

I was supposed to stop the array, start it in maintenance mode (never had to do that before), and run the check and repair of the xfs disk.

As I have a backup unraid server with the same files that is refreshed weekly, I have not really lost anything, plus my offsite backup disks were still onsite from when run a week ago - so there was that too - I slotted that disk in (unassigned) and am coping it all back.

 

One I get over all this shock, i will use my backup server as a testbed to play with these check/repair commands and document them for any future issues.

I imagine the disk2 I replaced with the hot swap disk will be fine if it passes the smart tests, and is re-formatted for use as a new unassigned hot swap disk.

 

[vw-kombi]

Well - This has all turned into a right pisser!

While my movies and TVShows are saved to another unraid server, that never had enough space for the Sports, Documentaries and StandUpComedy.

But that was all saved on my offsite backup disks.  This 8TB drive was going really slow to read (about 8MB/s). 

I stopped it, did an unmount, failed to unmount as its in use.  Nothing was using it that I could see, so I did a force umount on it.

I connected to another hole in my server, could not mount. went though all the recovery stuff I found on here, in the end, it mounted, but no data!!!!!

Moral of the story is I guess - have multiple copies of your data backed up!!!!!!  Luckily I copied the homemovies off it, and not copying that to multiple places in the house.

 

[trurl]

Not clear, did you ever actually try to repair the filesystem?

[vw-kombi]

Yep. I went through stuff i found here online.  

Forst to try and change uuid at command line, it said it could not do that and to run another command.  Did that, then after mouonting, all gone - just a few lost and found folder with little in them.

[vw-kombi]

This whole episode has made me re-thing my backup scenarios.

The unassigned disk was only reading at 25ish MBps which would have taken ages - I am hoping that was just due to it planning on failing as it did.

I was able to copy from my backup unraid server at 110MBps - This makes me think I should have a 'backup server' offsite, and not individual unassigned disks.

So - primary unraid server onsite - copied to a cold unraid server onsite (for when I am away and the wife/kids cant fix the main server), then an offsite unraid server just in case house burns down or a break in steals both the current unraid servers.