Did I err?


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Well, I'm expecting the prognosis is bad, but here's the setup:

I've been building my unraid from a collection that was previously on a series of 8tb drives connected to a USB hub to an Nvidia Shield .

 

My NAS started with a 10tb disk that was destined to be my parity disk. I completed a chain of copying data to the array, formatting the disks when they were empty, then adding them to the array. I finally had everything on Unraid, but no parity.

 

And...then I followed instructions on a forum post that said if I have User Shares, all I needed to do to remove a drive was to choose "New Config" and unselect the drive. So that's what I did: I setup a new config with all the drives but the original, set the 10tb as parity, and restarted. And now 17 hours later, it's still rebuilding the data but it seems clear that the data that was on the 10tb disk isn't showing up in the current array.

 

It's got about 2 more hours until the parity setup is finished. Have I lost that original 10tb?

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Any drive you set as parity is completely overwritten with the parity information (calculated from the content of the other array drives) and any existing content on that drive is lost.

 

I am not sure what you read that made you think anything else would happen.  It might be useful if we know what lead you to that conclusion.   Perhaps the confusion was that with a parity disk present and valid parity you can rebuild the contents of a failed drive?   Also User Shares have nothing to do with this anyway so there is some other level of confusion.

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7 hours ago, itimpi said:

 

I am not sure what you read that made you think anything else would happen.  It might be useful if we know what lead you to that conclusion.   Perhaps the confusion was that with a parity disk present and valid parity you can rebuild the contents of a failed drive?   Also User Shares have nothing to do with this anyway so there is some other level of confusion.

First off, I have to say that this was definitely the result of my own failure to parse clear and available instructions. This has been the tail of a long series of technical projects that I was anxious to complete, I've got a little stir crazy now that I'm homeschooling my kids in quarantine, and I failed to fully grok the setup before I triggered the data loss.

 

My assumption relied on an unbased assumption that because I had chosen User Shares, the data was tied to the user account, rather than the disk it resided in.  When it came time to finish the array and start the parity, rather than follow the unraid documentation, I was bouncing between tutorials and posts, and specifically I followed this link https://blog.linuxserver.io/2013/11/18/removing-a-drive-from-unraid-the-easy-way/

 

"Ok, next step is to reassign the drives you want to KEEP only. Leave the drives to be removed unassigned, start the array and let the parity resync complete (this can take a while). Optionally, you can do the parity resync at the end – it’s up to you (it’s what I did)."

 

...At this point I chose to make the new drive the parity, thinking that it would copy any data it was using for the User Data to a different hard drive before starting the parity. Sure enough, it said "Data Rebuilding", so I figured it was moving the data files into the array and building the parity in the process. This obviously in hindsight is ludicrous, and I see how I was making some base assumptions about how Unraid was handling files. Basically, I was under the impression that because I didn't choose "Disk Share", I was more or less obfuscated from handling anything in that domain and it was going to happen under the hood. This assumption was, of course, not based on anything tangible, and it wasn't long before I felt a creeping dread that I'd fubarred.

 

 

This afternoon it all hit me and it felt catastrophic.  3500 movies, and whatever in my television collection between N-P. On the plus side,  I'm pretty sure I can trawl my database from Plex to find exactly what I'm missing, and if I can grow my Code-fu to automate the process to rebuild everything, this can be an opportunity to grow. At the very least, I've learned a humble lesson.

 

Thank you for your time.

 

~Silas

 

(apologies if this should be a new thread): Is there a way I can access a log of the directory structure of my server from say, four days ago?

 

EDIT: Clarity

 

 

Edited by silasfelinus
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