Did I just *** myself? (can you recover RAID from format)


Justin_

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Hey guys, long story short I accidentally formatted 2 of the drives in my UnRAID array with only a single paraty drive. Short story long I had a system with a 3TB paraty drive, 3X2TB array drives, and one more 500GB array drive. I needed a 2TB drive for another system, so I bought a 4TB drive, swapped it with the paraty drive. At this point I had a 4TB paraty drive, 3X2TB array drives, and one more 500GB array drive. I then pulled out a 2TB drive and replaced it with the 3TB drive and threw the 2TB drive in another computer to clone another drive to it using Clonezilla. Before the clone even started it failed (because of something with the source disk) at that point UnRAID had booted up, and I realised I didn't pull the drive I was meaning too. So at that point I put the drive back in the system and pulled another 2TB drive. I set it in the system, but didn't clone it yet. I went into UnRAID and checked that the 2TB drive was all good even after being in a clonezilla box, it showed green so I assumed it was good and started the other drive cloning. I then went back to the UnRAID system and tried to start the array. Like expected it needed to rebuild the array on the 3TB drive, but it didn't recognise the 2TB drive as being part of the RAID. At that point I realised that the drive had been formatted, and UnRAID was only showing green because the serial number mached, not because it had the files on it. At that point I stopped UnRAID from cloning , at that point it had only written a few bytes so the drive is mostly untouched. So I have the 4TB paraty drive, ONE 2TB array drive, and one 500GB array drive that is still part of the array, with 2X2TB drives now not part of the array, along with the old 3TB paraty drive. With that I have access to 2.5TB  of my 6.5TB array. A lot of what I lost was system backups and that is not a big deal, but I also lost a lot of files.

 

Is there any way to rebuild the file tables on the drives to recover the full array? I know I can run format recovery software, but that (from my experience) will recover the files, but dump them all in the same folder without names (possibly separated by their file extensions).

 

Please tell me there is a way to recover from this and I didnt **** myself!!

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3 minutes ago, bobbintb said:

I'm having trouble following the train of events but if you formatted 2 drives and only had single parity you are pretty much out of luck. You can try to recover them with a deep file recovery scan, as you mentioned.

Yeah that is basically what happened. I was hoping there may be a way to rebuild the file system, but was doubtful

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I know that you can mount the drives to a linux system and just pull files from the drives, is that only possible with the array drives, or if I connected the paraty drive could I pull more files from that? I just really want to recover as much as I can. While a lot of what was lost was stuff I can recover (eg backups and *cough* leagle videos), a lot of it was photos and videos I took and files that I have collected and created over the years that I can't recover.

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Not that I am aware of. Someone else might have a different answer but I don't think so. The only way to rebuild the file system is if you have a copy or if you have recovery software that can attempt to reconstruct it. The reason why recovery software throws them into one folder with random names is because the file names and locations are stored in the filesystem. The software will search the entire disk looking for the beginnings and ends of files but without the file record it has no name and location. If you had some sort of index saved that would let you match up recovered files by size or hash, that might help identify files. Additionally, media files such as pictures, videos, and audio will usually have some kind of metadata attached to them. That can help in identifying files and there are many media tools that can rename files based on metadata. This might extend to other file types as well but I'm not sure.

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1 minute ago, Justin_ said:

I know that you can mount the drives to a linux system and just pull files from the drives, is that only possible with the array drives, or if I connected the paraty drive could I pull more files from that? I just really want to recover as much as I can. While a lot of what was lost was stuff I can recover (eg backups and *cough* leagle videos), a lot of it was photos and videos I took and files that I have collected and created over the years that I can't recover.

 

Not from a parity drive. They don't have a filesystem, I believe. If it's irreplaceable, just remember to have a backup in the future. Parity is not a backup.

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Yeah, that would be awesome (and I do have a .edu email (in class now :P)) but I only have a 10Mbps upload (only recently upped from 5Mbps) I need to move on campus next semester, a shared house is nice, but I think a gigabit/gigabit connection that is normally around 600X700 useable is worth more to me. I was at a 24 hour LAN party on campus and in about 18 hours I uploaded over 500GB to onedrive.

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6 minutes ago, bobbintb said:

Just be careful about campuses. Depending on the campus policies, they may cut you off if you are using too much of their bandwidth. I work at a university and we closely monitor traffic for students that upload or download too much, among other things.

Good to know. Anyway, turns out that my school is not part of the google drive program (we are part of the Microsoft mess :/) so I dont get unlimited google storage.

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Ok, well I have access to another 1TB on my personal account because somebody shared a copy of Office 365 with me. 2TB is not terrible. I wasn't sure as on my personal account I can see something like 'You have used XXXGB of 1TB' but I don't see anything like that on my school onedrive account.

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46 minutes ago, jazzysmooth said:

Back to the original topic, what file system were the drives formatted with, reiserfs or xfs?  You may be able to rebuild the directory tree and recover data. 

 

https://lime-technology.com/wiki/Check_Disk_Filesystems . (see XFS or ReiserFS section depending)

I am not 100% (not at home) but I think the drives would of been formatted NTFS as I was trying to clone a secondary Windows System drive (D:\) to them.

Rereading that, if you are talking about originally I believe they were formatted with whatever the default is. I can't remember the default formatting and I am not at home to check.

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Ok, so I tried that, but it didn't work as the drive was formatted. So I have moved from fixing to recovery. My problem is that most recovery software is expensive, and I don't have much cash. Dose anybody know of cheap/free XFS format recovery software that is capable of recovering all file formats (but most importantly photos and video)?

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33 minutes ago, Justin_ said:

Dose anybody know of cheap/free XFS format recovery software that is capable of recovering all file formats (but most importantly photos and video)?

 

I use this all the time for work, R-Studio, getting conflicting signals about XFS support (the version we have only supports ext2/3), one mirror claimed it would support BTRFS and XFS, their website does not, but there is a forum post (on their page) from 2011 of a customer asking about XFS and company replied they were working on it ... so give it a look over.

 

R-TT may not be in your, "cheap" category but I've seen past versions on Torrent indexers, so that's your choice/call. there was any zero'ing in the format R-TT won't be able to recover that. The more I look at R-TT site, the more I think it won't be the tool you want, can only look so much while I'm at work. 

 

Stellerphenox XFS Recovery tool $79 is looking like your best bet; co-worker has used other tools made by Stellar, so no worries about fake software or similar.

Edited by Jcloud
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