March 29, 20188 yr I managed to format/encrypt the wrong drive while doing array encryption; xfs -> xfs encrypted. One full with data. Nothing super important, but still... I'm testing Unraid under VMWare on W10 on a second computer so no parity drive was present. When I added a new empty drive the disk assignments in Windows changed so the new and the old disks got mixed up by Unraid. Because the disks are the same it went unnoticed on both ends, I suppose. Any chance at all to get back the data on that disk? I've written nothing to it after formatting.
March 30, 20188 yr Author 13 minutes ago, Warrentheo said: Are you saying that it was formatted NTFS, but you told it was formated with XFS? No the drive was XFS, and I accidentally reformatted it with XFS-encrypted instead of the new drive. All was done in Unraid. Disks are passed through to Unraid.
March 30, 20188 yr are you able to read the data then? if so, just use something like the unbalance plugin to empty the drive and try again...
March 30, 20188 yr Author 1 minute ago, Warrentheo said: are you able to read the data then? if so, just use something like the unbalance plugin to empty the drive and try again... I assumed no since the drive was formatted. I shut down the array and asked here so I don't do the wrong thing.
March 30, 20188 yr I think the process is a one way in-place encryption, but I don't know for sure, never tried it... The bottom line question is are you able to get data from the drive? If not it most likely is gone, but don't take my word for it...
March 30, 20188 yr 8 hours ago, Warrentheo said: I think the process is a one way in-place encryption, but I don't know for sure, never tried it... I don't think in place is supported yet, thus the OP's quandary. Given the abysmal state of catastrophic data recovery tools for XFS, and the lack of important data to recover, I'd say the best course of action is to chalk it up to a learning experience and move on. If you wish to try to recover for education's sake, UFS Explorer
March 30, 20188 yr Enabling encryption is equivalent to changing the file system of the disk. This requires the disk to be formatted using the new file system. Formatting a disk will always destroy the information on the disk. To perform a format, the action must be explicitely enabled and when enabling it there is an additional warning message saying all data will be destroyed. There are quite some fences to make clear the desctructive mode of this operation, but a user can always choose to ignore them with the known consequences.
March 30, 20188 yr Author 6 hours ago, jonathanm said: I don't think in place is supported yet, thus the OP's quandary. Given the abysmal state of catastrophic data recovery tools for XFS, and the lack of important data to recover, I'd say the best course of action is to chalk it up to a learning experience and move on. If you wish to try to recover for education's sake, UFS Explorer I will try that software if that is the only chance, worth a shot. If not, I'll chalk it up.. I was hoping there was some way to use the "xfs_repair" or similar tool in some way o rebuild the disk, since the data is still there, I think? Or doesn't it work that way with formatting? (This isn't my main Unraid machine, I run the Unraid-VM on my gaming/etc machine. Use it mainly for extra backup, some testing and media storage. Everything important is triple backed up. But basically 7 TB of media, games, etc gone.)
March 30, 20188 yr Formatting means throwing away all the indexing of the file system, and creating a new - and empty - index ready for you to copy new file data to the file system. So the majority of the data is still there, but it's similar to taking thousands of binders and empty their contents all over the floor in random order. It's hard work to try to get some order out of millions of randomly ordered leafs of paper... Repair tools can do a better or worse job of puzzling together some of the randomized information. But different tools performs better/worse and different file systems are easier/worse to try to recover data from. And it also matters how you have been used the file system - how much fragmentation there is. If you are lucky, there could be partial indexing information still available on the disk. But it's hard to tell.
March 30, 20188 yr Author 4 minutes ago, pwm said: Formatting means throwing away all the indexing of the file system, and creating a new - and empty - index ready for you to copy new file data to the file system. So the majority of the data is still there, but it's similar to taking thousands of binders and empty their contents all over the floor in random order. It's hard work to try to get some order out of millions of randomly ordered leafs of paper... Repair tools can do a better or worse job of puzzling together some of the randomized information. But different tools performs better/worse and different file systems are easier/worse to try to recover data from. And it also matters how you have been used the file system - how much fragmentation there is. If you are lucky, there could be partial indexing information still available on the disk. But it's hard to tell. Great explanation, thanks! What program/tool would you have tried using?
March 30, 20188 yr I have very little experience specifically with XFS recovery, but UFS Explorer that you got a link to earlier is one of the most recommended tools.
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