Hello.

I'm looking for some guidance on dealing with an accidental deletion of my primary Unraid server's root directory.

Summary:

While trying to delete some content from one of my pool devices, I executed "rm -rf /*" via the terminal from within the DVR directory of that pool device. When I realized more than that was being deleted (~10 sec) I immediately cut the power to the server. The Unraid flash drive was empty, so I re-installed a (fairly) recent backup and was able to boot back into the server. I did NOT restart the array, as I noticed all of the unassigned devices were showing a size of 0B for the respective partitions. My assumption is that the content of all of the array devices, and all of the pool devices, were deleted as well.

Questions:

1. Is it safe to start the array to check if the contents of all of the attached devices were deleted?

2. Assuming that the array and pool devices were wiped, is there any way to undo this from within Unraid?

3. Assuming that Unraid is unable to recover the deleted content, is it viable to attempt data recovery via a 3rd party tool on each device (5 8TB HDDs, 3 SSDs, and 2 NVMes)? Note that I have a "backup" Unraid server where I have previously backed up (via rsync) my user shares, however, the last backup was ~4 months ago and there is a delta of ~5TB between the primary and backup servers. If at all possible, I'm trying to avoid having to re-rip the hundreds of movies/tv since the last backup, never mind having to re-establish the entire primary Unraid server (plug-ins, apps, networking, etc).

Any guidance would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

Reboot to see the damage, if the data was really deleted, it won't cause any issues, other than losing it.

Apologies for the delayed response. Had some additional issues with the flash drive that I was finally able to get resolved. Looks like I got lucky this time!

Setup a new config, assigned parity/array drives and pools, and successfully restarted the array. Data on all drives seems to have been retained. Running a parity check with corrections now. Will be executing more regular backups.

Thanks for your help!