Lost all my shares and data

[Gelbert]

Hi Guys

 

Been reading up and seeing no one with my predicament, and after a week of completely not even looking at that bloody UNraid server, being suicidal at times just thinking of everything I lost
(almost 50TB of data), I'm at my wits end....

 

So here is what happened. I created a new usb device as the old one broke, and after rebooting with the new one, restored the appdata settings and data back from the build in tool ([Plugin] CA Appdata Backup / Restore v2) that I installed, and then rebooted. 

 

Once it restarted somehow all my shares were gone, and it showed that I have zero shares and 100% free space again. What the hell...??

 

I think at some stage, I cleaned some appshare data, and not sure if I somehow deleted something.

 

Will I be able to recover my data? I recovered some of my data from disk 1 using a UFS file explorer program I have, but this will be taking forever.

 

I'm really at a loss as what I can do and hope one of you guys can give me pointers, or is this a lost cause?

 

Thanks so much guys

 

Gelbert

jaga-diagnostics-20200823-1936.zip

[trurl]

Unrelated to your issue, except as it relates to the difficulty of making sense of your syslog.

Your syslog goes back a few days, I guess this is when you booted back up after

9 hours ago, Gelbert said:

a week of completely not even looking at that bloody UNraid server

So whatever happened we don't have any record of. And many things don't show up in syslog anyway, such as

9 hours ago, Gelbert said:

I think at some stage

User error of some kind seems the most likely explanation.

 

 

9 hours ago, Gelbert said:

I created a new usb device as the old one broke, and after rebooting with the new one, restored the appdata settings and data back from the build in tool ([Plugin] CA Appdata Backup / Restore v2)

A little unclear about this part. Appdata Backup makes a backup of appdata, and it can make a backup of flash. The "appdata settings", the way I would interpret that, is the settings for the user share named appdata. Those would be on flash along with a lot of other things, and could be restored from the flash backup if you had that set up.

 

Did you restore the data for the appdata user share? If so, I don't see why this would have been needed, since replacing flash should have no effect on the data on your drives, such as the appdata user share.

 

Or did you restore the flash backup? Or both?

 

Maybe a screenshot of your settings for CA Backup plugin would have a clue what happened, though it won't help now.

 

9 hours ago, Gelbert said:

using a UFS file explorer

This is probably your only hope.

 

9 hours ago, Gelbert said:

thinking of everything I lost
(almost 50TB of data)

You must have a backup plan. You absolutely must have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable.

[Energen]

Did you have a backup of your flash drive?  The flash drive is what holds all your array/share info, not the appdata folder.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, Energen said:

Did you have a backup of your flash drive?  The flash drive is what holds all your array/share info, not the appdata folder.

But there is almost no data on his disks. Flash backup will not help with that.

[Gelbert]

See, my thinking is that when I originally setup my server, the UNraid virgin in me somehow created the flash appdata on the disk 1 partition. This was also one of the reasons why I wanted to move the appdata back from disk 1 to the flash disk, as those dockers were extremely slow

 

Yeah, learned a valuable lesson today, make 100% sure before you do anything on these servers. Luckily I lost a drive a couple of months ago, and now make sure that I have backups of my photos and my personal documents, but man having to download all the music, movies and series again will be a killer to have to do again.

 

Any cloud storage cheap enough to host my 50tb of entertainment data?

[trurl]

31 minutes ago, Gelbert said:

See, my thinking is that when I originally setup my server, the UNraid virgin in me somehow created the flash appdata on the disk 1 partition. This was also one of the reasons why I wanted to move the appdata back from disk 1 to the flash disk, as those dockers were extremely slow

Perhaps you really meant to say "cache disk" instead of "flash disk".

 

There is no "flash appdata". And you really don't want any data on flash. Flash is just the archive of the OS, and settings from the webUI. The OS archive is unpacked fresh into RAM at each boot, and the OS runs in RAM. Saved settings from the webUI are loaded into RAM, and updates to these settings are saved to flash so they can be reapplied at boot. These are normally the only way flash is used, and you don't want to even attempt to save anything to flash yourself, and flash shouldn't get a lot of read/writes so it will last.

 

appdata is a user share. That user share, along with system and domains user shares, are used by your dockers/VMs, and it is best if these user shares are kept on cache so dockers/VMs performance will not be impacted by slower parity updates, and so these won't keep array disks spinning.

 

Your user shares are on cache and array, and have nothing to do with flash beyond the settings for each user share which you make in the webUI. User shares are simply the aggregated top level folders on cache and array.

 

39 minutes ago, Gelbert said:

learned a valuable lesson today

In addition to a backup plan (make one now), another lesson you might consider is asking for advice before doing the wrong thing.

[trurl]

I'm thinking what may have happened is you had the root of user shares /mnt/user as the destination for restoring appdata, with the result that they were all replaced with only the restored appdata.

 

4 hours ago, trurl said:

Maybe a screenshot of your settings for CA Backup plugin would have a clue what happened

 

[Gelbert]

1 minute ago, trurl said:

I'm thinking what may have happened is you chose the root of user shares /mnt/user as the destination for restoring appdata, with the result that they were all replaced with only the restored appdata.

 

 

Yeah, I'm almost 100% sure this is where I screwed things up. I checked now and the appdata source now reads "/mnt/cache/" but I'm dead sure I had them both as "/mnt/user", which will explain it overwrote everything. It is now correct (I think), and hope this doesn't happen again. I know that once it happened, I went ahead and deleted all my dockers out of frustration.

 

My appdata share was set to "/mnt/user/appdata", and now it looks different after I re-installed the plugin.

[trurl]

One last thing on this. Do you always keep your plugins up-to-date? It might be you were using an old version of CA Backup and newer versions would have prevented this mistake. Let's see if @Squid has anything to add.

[Squid]

Disk 1 has 1.4T of data on it, and the cache has 56G of data on it (all the appdata share).  

 

On 8/23/2020 at 3:42 AM, Gelbert said:

I cleaned some appshare data,

This would be my best guess as to the problems if you used the Cleanup Appdata plugin.In the case of a massively misconfigured docker app being installed at one point, then the plugin will dutifully want to delete what you've set the /config mapping to.   Which is why it has the double confirmation, folder list, and big banner warning. 

[Gelbert]

Well, it happened again..... sort of......!!!

 

I tried logging in yesterday and couldn't. I couldn't ping the server, couldn't SSH to it, couldn't get in via the webgui, nothing, nada, zilge, zero.....

 

Restarted numerous times, still dead as a doornail. I eventually took the usb out, deleted the network.cfg file (thinking it might just use dynamic to get a new IP) and nothing still. Still can't access the server.

 

So I copied over the config folder to my pc, created a clean install, copied over the config folder again, and some stuff now is accessible. The problem currently is that everything looks good, but when I start the array, it says starting array with mounting disks next to it, and it's been sitting there for almost 15 hours and nothing has changed. So I restarted it about an hour ago and tried again and it still is stuck on that. But I'm at work now so can't do anything much further.

 

My question is, I can see the disks in the terminal, and the data, how to I get that back as the shares are not showing up in the webgui nor can I browse to it from my computer?

 

 

Edited September 17, 2020 by Gelbert

[trurl]

14 minutes ago, Gelbert said:

I can see the disks in the terminal, and the data

How are you able to look at this?