How to properly recover data from parity drive.

[cdixon]

I have a server that I use to store all my movies and TV shows. The server has five days drives and two parity drives. One day, I added too many files at once to drive 1 and this lead to error that deleted most of the memory on said drive. I took out drive one, hooked it up to my computer and used ufs file explorer to retrieve the data and add it to the parity drives. It is possible that I can rebuild drive 1 with the data that I recently added to the parity drives? What is the proper way to go about doing this without losing memory?

[Frank1940]

Is English your primary language?  (The reason that I am asking is that your are talking about 'memory' on a hard drive.  In the English technical world, that is not proper usage. In a hard drive, we talk about storage space and files.)  If English is your second language, you could be quite technically knowledgeable but if you are primary English speaking, you are a noob.    With that out of the way, let's start to examine what is going on.

4 hours ago, cdixon said:

One day, I added too many files at once to drive 1 and this lead to error that deleted most of the memory on said drive.

Exactly how did you do this?   Usually, once a drive is 'filled', the OS will simply not add more files onto the disk and sends back error messages to the user.  Obviously, the files for which there was not room for on the hard drive, will be 'lost' but no existing files on the hard drive should be effected.  They should still be there.

4 hours ago, cdixon said:

I took out drive one, hooked it up to my computer and used ufs file explorer to retrieve the data and add it to the parity drives.

Again, how did you do this?  With Unraid, you can not write directly to the parity disks. The information stored on the parity disks is the result of a mathematical calculation.  (There is no actual user data stored on either parity disk!)  See here for a simple explanation:

 

    https://wiki.unraid.net/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#Parity-Protected_Array

 

Now for some thoughts from me.  You should be using User Shares.  In fact, it is the default for Unraid.  (In fact, using Disk Shares is actually discouraged...)  See here for details:

 

      https://wiki.unraid.net/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#User_Shares

 

User Shares will automatically spread your data across all of the disks in your array according to a predetermined setting.  (The default is 'High water'.)   You could have overfilled overfill Disk 1, if you did not set the 'Minimum Free Space' Parameter to a value larger than the largest file you expected to store on that share.  (For this setting,  go to SHARES, click on the Share Name, then look in the Share Settings tab/section.)    However, the only way, you could have run into this issue is if all of the other data disks assigned to this User Share were also filled.

 

5 hours ago, cdixon said:

It is possible that I can rebuild drive 1 with the data that I recently added to the parity drives? What is the proper way to go about doing this without losing memory?

 It is going to depend on the answers to the above questions (and possibly, a few more questions).  You have started down a road using UFS that should have been a last resort after you resolved the issues on your Unraid server.  We are also going to need your Diagnostics file.   Tools   >>>  Diagnostics

 

PS. Post everything up in a new post.  Never edit an old post to add new information as it will virtually never be noticed!

[cdixon]

Here is a screenshot of my unraid dashboard and the diagnostics. Hope this helps.

tower-diagnostics-20191125-0824.zip

[Frank1940]

From what I can see Disk 1 has been missing ( I assume that you physically removed it before this startup) since the system was started back on Nov 7th.  There is 18 days of operation with a missing disk. (You have more guts than I would have had under this situation.)  I am going to ping @johnnie.black as he is the best person that I can think of to help you out at this juncture. 

 

From the screen capture, you have not written (nor read) to Disk 1 since the server was started back on Nov 7th.  Was it during this period when you did the copy of the files from Disk 1 back to the array?  Did you actually use the UFS recovery tools?  IF so, exactly what type of file/data recovery did you do have to do with UFS File Explorer? 

 

By the way, you did not really answer any of my questions?  Anyone who is trying to provide you with useful assistance is going to have to know how you got to this point.  (I figured out with your  last reply you are a native English speaker.)

Edited November 25, 2019 by Frank1940

[JorgeB]

If I am correctly understanding the question:

9 hours ago, cdixon said:

It is possible that I can rebuild drive 1 with the data that I recently added to the parity drives?

Disk1 is currently being emulated, using parity plus the other drives, any data currently on the emulated disk1 is the same that will be there if you rebuild it, so answer is yes, assuming that is what the OP is asking.

[cdixon]

1 hour ago, Frank1940 said:

From what I can see Disk 1 has been missing ( I assume that you physically removed it before this startup) since the system was started back on Nov 7th.  There is 18 days of operation with a missing disk. (You have more guts than I would have had under this situation.)  I am going to ping @johnnie.black as he is the best person that I can think of to help you out at this juncture. 

 

From the screen capture, you have not written (nor read) to Disk 1 since the server was started back on Nov 7th.  Was it during this period when you did the copy of the files from Disk 1 back to the array?  Did you actually use the UFS recovery tools?  IF so, exactly what type of file/data recovery did you do have to do with UFS File Explorer? 

 

By the way, you did not really answer any of my questions?  Anyone who is trying to provide you with useful assistance is going to have to know how you got to this point.  (I figured out with your  last reply you are a native English speaker.)

First off, I am a native English speaker.

 

And I added data back to the array after Nov. 7. Yesterday, I finished recovering all the data from the drive I took out on Nov. 7. How I went about recovering the data is I used the "recover lost data" option on UFS recovery tools to get my files back and then I copied the recovered files from the drive to the array .

 

How this problem with the drive first started, was when I was copying a dvd to the server while adding a jpeg file to the folder that the dvd was being burned to.

 

 

 

Edited November 25, 2019 by cdixon