Hi, little over a week ago I went through the process of converting from many small drives to 4 8TB drives (2 parity, 2 data). I followed this guide https://docs.unraid.net/legacy/FAQ/shrink-array/ using the "Remove Drives Then Rebuild Parity" method. Everything went great! I was able to slightly increase my storage and decrease my power use at the same time.

 

All of my data has been in use and the server has been operating normally for the past few days. Today, I noticed I was missing almost everything in my Plex library.... I looked at the unraid "main" page and my array showed about 175GB of use, down from around 8TB!?!

 

Where should I even begin for how to recover the data? I currently have the array offline and plan to leave it that way until I can figure this out.

tower-diagnostics-20240224-1446.zip

Can't tell anything about your filesystems without the array started.

 

Start the array and post new diagnostics

Sorry, here is an updated diagnostic I made after starting the array.

tower-diagnostics-20240224-1520.zip

Did it ever say your disks were unmountable?

 

Probably someone reformatted your array disks but nothing in those diagnostics shows what happened.

 

Is your server on the internet?

 

Do you have older diagnostics or syslogs?

 

Do you still have the original disks?

It never said unmountable or had an error that I saw. Everything was working fine last night, today everything is gone. I didn't change any settings or anything that should affect the data since then.

 

I don't think the disks were formatted because there are still tons of folders in my shares, they're just empty.

 

The server does have access to the internet. Plex broadcasts outside of my network but for everything else I VPN into my home router and access that way. Plex is run from a docker container. I am the only one with access and I have never shared any username/password. I don't suspect someone logging in maliciously somehow and deleting my data. Like I said above, the folders are still there. Maybe that's easy though with software or a command line?

 

Unfortunately I don't have an older log. I also made the mistake of updating and restarting when I noticed something wrong.

 

I still have the original disks. I would still need to do data recovery though. Instead of copying the data off of the disks I cut and pasted.

Is this possibly the issue?

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/116933-solved-please-help-tv-shows-are-getting-deleted-automatically/?do=findComment&comment=1068346