I'm an idiot! I pulled an HD from my free as server with intentions of using it as a parity drive. 3 minutes in I realized it had important stuff on it. I stopped the sync and pulled the drive. How screwed am I! I believe the drive was UFS. It's only been a few hours. I've tried a few online recovery tools but no luck so far.  :'(

The over-writing begins at the lowest number LBAs and works upwards so a lot of important filesystem data will have been over-written. If there are redundant copies of the relevant information elsewhere on the disk you might be able to recover some files but I wouldn't want to give you hope and then see you disappointed. I don't know much about UFS or its recovery tools and it isn't a filesystem that unRAID uses but there are some clever people here and someone might be able to suggest something. That's assuming it was a stand-alone disk. Since there's some doubt in your mind as to its actual format, is there a possibility that it might have been a member of a RAID set (you mention a "free as" server - FreeNAS?)? If so, your data should be recoverable from the remaining disks in the set.

Sorry i wrote this post in a hurry. Yes it was from a Freenas server. I'm sure it was a standalone drive but can't remember if it was UFS. It was definitely not ZFS. Long story behind that one. I know this might not be the place to ask but if anyone can point me in the right direction I would be most grateful.

Let's face reality: your chances of recovering any data at all are slim. If you aren't certain what the filesystem is your chances are pretty much zero. You need to run whatever maintenance tool is appropriate for the broken filesystem and even then it isn't very likely to help. If you run the wrong one it will make matters worse. It's time to get out the backups.

 

Good practices:

1) Check, double check, then triple check before formatting/preclearing/adding new parity/anything that will wipe a drive.

2) Keep a secondary backup of everything important, in a completely different machine or location.

 

Hopefully you did #2.

As has already been noted, there's virtually no chance of recovering data from that drive.

 

You'll either need to restore the data from your backups or, if the FreeNAS system was fault-tolerant, simply rebuild that disk onto another disk of the same size (or even onto itself).    If you don't have backups, and the file system wasn't fault tolerant, then the data is simply lost.

 

If you didn't have backups, this should be a good lesson as to WHY backups are important !!  NO RAID system -- not even UnRAID with dual parity -- is a substitute for backing up any data you don't want to lose.

 

 

Yes I messed up! The best backup I had was 8 months old. Yes I should have double checked the new server before messing with the old one. Lesson learned.

 

Update:

With some advice from another forum I've tried a program called UFS explorer. This program might save my butt! Drive had no readable partitions so first step was to 'find partition' which took about 30 minutes. It did detect an unreadable UFS partition at some sector count like 181,000,000. Now I'm doing the data recovery part. ETA is 17 hours. Fingers crossed but this might get me what I need. If it's there I will have to purchase though.

Well, I wish you the best of luck.

 

I'm running this on one of my drives right now that had XFS corruption...16 hours to go but things look promising.  I was at risk of losing 60+ lossless bdrips.    Not a big deal as I can always get them back (eventually) but this sure would be a much shorter path.  The BIGGER issue is the pics of my boys that I most certainly do not want to lose.

 

Not sure if you are still around Tevian but how did you make out?

 

John

What utility are you running against your XFS disk, John? The OP believed his disk was UFS formatted and was using UFS Explorer.

What utility are you running against your XFS disk, John? The OP believed his disk was UFS formatted and was using UFS Explorer.

 

UFS Explorer handles a LOT of filesystems, not just UFS.  It is a very useful application, but costs real $$$ for the pro version.  I use it frequently for client data recovery.

€39.95 for the personal version, which may not be a bad deal if it's particularly valuable data....

 

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

 

 

That was for the standard version, not Pro... and you have to have Pro version if you want to handle btrfs, ReiserFS, and some others.  Personal license for Pro is $200.  And that doesn't even begin to approach what you have to spend for recovery hardware like a PC-3000, or even DeepSpar.

 

€39.95 for the personal version, which may not be a bad deal if it's particularly valuable data....

 

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