I don't know how this could be possible, but after checking the remaining space on the hard drive that has all of my important files which had 1.18TB worth of family pictures and videos, all of a sudden, it is now 1.08TB. I don't know if the upgrade from 7.2.4 to 7.3 caused it, or if it was something else, but that hard drive in particular is very healthy and a parity check without write corrections didn't restore any files. It's like the files disappeared, even though the folders are still there. What's even more strange is that I was going through all of the folders that are in alphabetical order and all of the folders beyond the letter M are completely empty.

I asked AI what it could be, but it's such an odd problem, nothing in my particular situation came up.

Is there any possible reason why this happened?

Start by posting your diagnostics. Is your server exposed to the internet?

25 minutes ago, Gragorg said:

Start by posting your diagnostics. Is your server exposed to the internet?

Yes, but only through Tailscale.

ckk-diagnostics-20260604-1259.zip

Edited June 4Jun 4 by ckkbleev

Unless there was an unmountable disk or pool, it could not have been the upgrade; if the files are really missing, there are typically two reasons: the server is exposed to the internet and was hacked or there's a container/plugin that removed them while doing some maintenance.

The only thing I can think of is that I run a full backup on that hard drive with Duplicati directly to an external hard drive, but why would it only delete my pictures in folders starting with "M" all the way to "Z" and everything else is fine? There is zero chance that the server was hacked on Tailscale.

If actual files are missing, something or someone must have deleted them.

Nobody has access to my server but me and I'm certain I wouldn't nuke half of my personal data. I thought that it may have been some corruption on that particular drive because there was a red lock next to it when I restarted the server and even after I put in the correct password, the array refused to start. Luckily, I was told to boot into a Linux live USB, drag & drop into another hard drive and wipe that drive after log back into Unraid. That's the only thing that actual worked, but still no answers as to why. I was going to switch from XFS to ZFS to potentially prevent this issue from happening again, but decided against it.

Missing files and filesystem corruption is possible, but typically only after the filesystem is not mounting and you repair the filesystem; in this case, xfs_repair, if the corruption is bad enough, can move some lost files/folders to lost+found, never seen that happen without logged signs of corruption and the user then runing xfs_repair.

What were the most recent list of events leading up to this discovery of the data "going missing"?

It was really nothing out of the ordinary. I upgraded the server from 7.2.4 to 7.3 a few days before. I also ran a few daily backups through Duplicati, I think there was a parity sync and all of a sudden, I noticed a huge chunk of my files missing. No errors, no random restarts, no failing drives, nothing that I could really point to which is why I thought it was so strange.

I would comb over your container logs to see if any other maintenance occurred. Unraid doesnt/cant delete data so either you have a script/plugin that pruned it OR a container did it.

And you're absolutely sure that you didnt open any ports to any services to the internet NOT through tailscale?

Edited June 5Jun 5 by MowMdown

I literally can't open up any ports to the internet since I'm behind CG-NAT. The only other plugins I have are appdata backup and something to backup plugins.