I accidentally deleted about 800 movies and need help recovering them. I had my share drive mapped in Windows 10 and saw a movies and a Movies (note the capitalization). I thought the folder got copied accidentally so I compared them and they had exactly the same contents. I thought I was safe but clearly I wasn't. I shut down the array, I dont believe anything was written but its possible. Any advice is appreciated.

First thing to do would be to verify if the movies still exist in whatever folder they are supposed to be in...  Do this via the Shares tab on unRaid and browse the share.

 

Do you have the recycle bin plugin installed by chance?

 

 

Can you describe your share setup a little better? Was it a user share or a disk share or both? How many disks? What filesystem?

25 minutes ago, Squid said:

First thing to do would be to verify if the movies still exist in whatever folder they are supposed to be in...  Do this via the Shares tab on unRaid and browse the share.

 

Do you have the recycle bin plugin installed by chance?

 

 

No and no. I have a cache disk so I should be able to install recycle bin without writing to my main array. Thoughts?

2 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Can you describe your share setup a little better? Was it a user share or a disk share or both? How many disks? What filesystem?

User share. 4 total disk - (3) 4GB (1 is parity) and 1 2GB for 10GB usuable

Doesn't matter know about the recycle bin, and the number one thing to do is to avoid at all costs writes to the array.  The more writes you make, you less chance you have of recovering.

 

I'm far from an expert here, but at the end of the day you're going to wind up pulling those disks out and tossing them into a windows box and running some sort of XFS / btrfs / reiserfs recovery tool on them to recover the deleted files.  But, I'd wait for someone more knowledgeable / familiar with the actual process before doing anything.  But don't write anything to the disks at all.   Ideally shut the server off.

 

Where in the share were the "duplicate" folders?

5 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Where in the share were the "duplicate" folders?

/mnt/user/media/videos/Movies and /mnt/user/media/videos/movies. movies is empty, Movies has a thumbs.db file from the cifs mount

 

9 minutes ago, Squid said:

Doesn't matter know about the recycle bin, and the number one thing to do is to avoid at all costs writes to the array.  The more writes you make, you less chance you have of recovering.

 

I'm far from an expert here, but at the end of the day you're going to wind up pulling those disks out and tossing them into a windows box and running some sort of XFS / btrfs / reiserfs recovery tool on them to recover the deleted files.  But, I'd wait for someone more knowledgeable / familiar with the actual process before doing anything.  But don't write anything to the disks at all.   Ideally shut the server off.

 

thanks squid. I did a backup a few months ago so I should be able to get most of them back that way. I was hoping to get everything 

3 minutes ago, johnnykilo said:

/mnt/user/media/videos/Movies and /mnt/user/media/videos/movies. movies is empty, Movies has a thumbs.db file from the cifs mount

 

And I'm assuming that the drive was mapped to /mnt/user/media/videos/Movies (or movies) and not to /mnt/user/media or /mnt/user/media/videos

 

2 minutes ago, Squid said:

And I'm assuming that the drive was mapped to /mnt/user/media/videos/Movies (or movies) and not to /mnt/user/media or /mnt/user/media/videos

 

The drive is shared at /mnt/user/media

Restoring from your backup / re-ripping / re-downloading is the easiest solution (although it may wind up being the longest)

 

Windows has a rule that no two subfolders can be named the same only differing by case (Movies & movies).  The problem is that as far as every other OS in existence, Movies & movies are allowed to coexist with no ill effects.  But once Windows sees that, strange things happen (as you found out)

 

To prevent this from happening again in the future, delete both of those folders from unRaid (since you're already resigned to restoring from your backups), and then double check that each and everyone of your docker applications is referencing one or the other of those spellings (as docker A referencing "movies" and docker B referencing "Movies" is what usually causes this.)

 

That, and install dlandon's Recycle Bin plugin...

11 minutes ago, Squid said:

Restoring from your backup / re-ripping / re-downloading is the easiest solution (although it may wind up being the longest)

 

Windows has a rule that no two subfolders can be named the same only differing by case (Movies & movies).  The problem is that as far as every other OS in existence, Movies & movies are allowed to coexist with no ill effects.  But once Windows sees that, strange things happen (as you found out)

 

To prevent this from happening again in the future, delete both of those folders from unRaid (since you're already resigned to restoring from your backups), and then double check that each and everyone of your docker applications is referencing one or the other of those spellings (as docker A referencing "movies" and docker B referencing "Movies" is what usually causes this.)

 

That, and install dlandon's Recycle Bin plugin...

Thanks for the help. I installed it already. I'll clean up my folders   fwiw I'm pretty sure the second folder got created when I created a Radarr docker and mapped Movies instead of movies. Unraid didn't mind but Windows did, exactly as you said.