Hello dear community,

After many mentally exhausting weeks, I’m now turning to the forum for help.

I will try to reconstruct the events as accurately as possible so that you can better understand the situation and help me.

I have an Unraid system with one parity drive and four data drives, plus a pool with two additional drives.

One of the array drives started showing SMART errors, so I replaced it.
Later, I realized that I must have made a mistake during the reconstruction. Fortunately, I still had the faulty drive, and it was still readable — so I used the Unraid File Explorer to move data from the faulty drive back into the array.

I’m not entirely sure whether I did this before or after, but at some point I also used dupeguru to remove duplicates. It's possible that a mistake occurred during this step as well.

Much later, I noticed that a large number of folders are now completely empty. The folder structure is still intact — but for some reason, the content is missing.

I still have the faulty drive. However, possibly due to the move operation, it now appears to be empty. If I’m lucky, the data might still be there, just marked as deleted.

I hope the missing data can either be recovered or still exists on the faulty drive.

This is just a brief summary to give you a rough overview. I also attempted to recover data in read-only mode, but without success. I'm happy to share any other relevant details if needed.

Thank you for reading this post — I hope someone can help me.

Many thanks!
Peter

Fist post the diagnostics to see ig there are any visible filesystem issues, and keep the old drive intact. If there were no other writes to it, you should be able to recover the deleted data with something like UFS explorer.

First of all, thank you so much for the quick reply — I honestly didn’t expect that.
Secondly, I’ve attached the diagnostics file.

tower-diagnostics-20250713-2208.zip

No filesystem issues that IO can see, if the data is really missing, the best option may be to try and recover it from the old disk. UFS Explorer has a free trial that should show what data it can recover.

Hello again,
thank you for checking the diagnostic file. I’ve now run UFS Explorer on the drive, and it did find some data – but very little, and all of it unimportant. I actually did this at the very beginning, but I didn’t understand at the time that I was dealing with LUKS encryption and needed to decrypt it first...

Even though you didn’t say it directly, your post gave me new hope and a sense of calm. Thank you!

I still find it very strange that the folder structure appears intact, yet most of the contents are gone. A few files are still there.

Now I’m not sure how to proceed.
I’ll wait for your reply.
Peter

Now I’ve noticed something odd: the 11 recovered files are actually quite large — totaling around 95 GB. One of them is even a 15 GB TIFF file, which I find very strange.

Could it be that there’s actually more data present, but in the wrong format? Maybe the headers or metadata are damaged or missing?

Thank you again!

I can't really help with UFS Explorer since I've never used it, but there are multiple reports of other users using it successfully, though it will typically only work if nothing was written on top of the deleted data.