I made a bonehead move last night attempting to download a folder of files from a CF card to a client's folder on my unRAID server.

 

The scenario is this: Forgetting that I had already downloaded a sub-folder titled 100EOS5D into the client's main folder, I attempted to drag and drop a new one in...Bridge asked me if I wanted to resolve, replace or cancel the folder because one with the same name already existed, and like a moron because I was exhausted, I hit replace...immediately realizing my error, I hit cancel. But the damage was already done, because the folder was replaced although no files were actually moved because of the cancel.

 

My question is...do the photo files still exist on the drives somewhere if I have not written anything else to them...and if so, how do I find them? I am running windows xp on a system set up by xi computers.

 

Any assistance will be more than greatly appreciated...the photos very meaningful to the client and if I can't recover them, it's not going to be good

 

Thanks!

Try something like this: http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/reiserfs_data_recovery_howto.comments

 

Instead of /home you will have /mnt/disk1, 2, 3....  you will need to know which disk the files were on.  I suppose if you were using user-shares you could go through this procedure on each of your drives.    It is good that you are not writing to the drives... if you did, the odds of you recovering any files are much lower.

 

First, this procedure must be done with the unRAID array started.  If you stop it, the "md" devices will not be accessible and any files you recover would break the parity validity.  As long as the array is started, and you do this to the "mdX" device, parity will be fine.

 

Let's assume the deleted files were on disk3.

cd /root

/root/samba stop

umount /mnt/disk3

reiserfsck --rebuild-tree -S -l /boot/recovery.log /dev/md3

If the reiserfs command prompts for you to type "Yes" to continue, type exactly "Yes" (Upper case "Y", and lower case "es".)

 

Wait for it to finish.  (it could take a long time if it is a large drive with lots of files) When done, you will see the "root" prompt once more.

 

Then, mount the file system and re-start samba using the following commands:

mount -t reiserfs -o noatime,nodiratime /dev/md3 /mnt/disk3

/root/samba start

 

Look for the lost+found directory in the root of the partition. In this example, that would be: /mnt/disk3/lost+found

This directory contains all the files that could be recovered. Unfortunately, the filenames are not preserved for a lot of files. You'll find some sub-directories - filenames within those are preserved!

Look through the files and copy back what you need.

 

Good Luck

 

Joe L.

Thank you so much for taking the time to help Joe! Recovered the files and life is back to good times!!!

 

Have a great night

Thank you so much for taking the time to help Joe! Recovered the files and life is back to good times!!!

 

Have a great night

 

Your experience should serve as a reminder to all of us that raid or unraid is NOT a complete substitute for backups.  While we are protected from hardware failures, but we are not protected from the inevitable human error.

 

I suggest you make backups off of the unraid onto a totally separate USB, eSata, or firewire drive.  A 1TB drive will hold many tens of thousands of photos.  At the resolution and compression I use, a 1TB drive holds over 300,000 photos, but you may be shooting at higher res and/or RAW, so you may get fewer.  Regardless, at well under $200, the ability to backup up what is probably a lifetime worth of photos is inexpensive insurance.

 

 

Bill

Hi,

 

  I realize this is an old thread but my issue is related so I thought I'd reply here rather than start a new thread. I'm new to both unRAID and the ReiserFS. After running the command reiserfsck --rebuild-tree -S -l /boot/recovery.log /dev/md1 I was unable to mount the filesystem, getting the error can't read superblock. Would anyone have any recommendations?

 

Thanks

You need to rebuild your superblock.

You can only run this once per drive so don't make a mistake. Don't re-run it if it doesnt work as it will destroy the partition info.

 

reiserfsck --rebuild-sb /dev/md1

 

 

 

 

You need to rebuild your superblock.

You can only run this once per drive so don't make a mistake. Don't re-run it if it doesnt work as it will destroy the partition info.

 

reiserfsck --rebuild-sb /dev/md1

You might be lucky, but there are a series of prompts when you run this command, and the correct answers are NOT the default.

See the wiki for the correct responses to the prompts. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Check_Disk_Filesystems

 

Joe L.