Help - I think I lost all the data

[CaptainMorganCrunch]

unraid version 6.8.3

 

I installed unraid to an old, "cheap" Opteron AMD chassis that had 12 hot-swap bays near early 2020, I believe, for my brother's family.  I planned on using up all the 500GB-3TB drives I had kicking around. I had an 8 disk array with 2 parity and 2 SSD drives for cache. IIRC, I had moved over most of the video, music and pictures from their failing Windows Home Server.  I created a Windows VM, but don't recall if I deleted that or not after some testing.  I want to say 2-4TB's of data, IIRC.  It was loud and drew lots of power, so it was put out in the garage that was heated and covered.  Unfortunately, sometime in July, the server went offline and when I went to check on it, the server could not power on. There was significant dust on the chassis.  The motherboard seemed to be dead.

 

All the spare motherboards I had were limited to 8 drives so I ordered a "glotrends PCIe to SATA Ports Adapter Card (SA3006)" add-in card to connect 4 extra drives. 

 

 

It's now November, but what I remember, is that I put in the adapter card and booted it up and could see all the drives recognized. I don't think I thought to pay closer attention to the data, just the drives and whether they were present.  But in order to put the unRaid server back at my brother's home (this time in a storage room), I'd need to move it to a quieter chassis, and use less than 8 drives. I got busy and I didn't have time to deal with that, so it's just been sitting unpowered for 4 months until I powered it up today to try and get it going again.

 

All the drives are showing up and the only errors were CRC (the old AMD chassis would generate CRC errors).  Once acknowledged, all are green again. However, when I check the shares for videos, pictures, music, etc, all the data is gone.  Out of 5.5TB of storage, it says only 27.4GB of data used! 

I was really hoping I was suffering memory loss and that I moved all the data from the shares to my local PC and was just forgetting after 4 months, but I can't find anything in my one and only backup location "My Backups".  So, I'm currently operating as if the data just up and disappeared without losing the array or any super obvious error in the webGUI.

 

Since noticing that all the data was missing today, I rebooted the server (doh!) hoping it would find all the data this time, but no change.  I've initiated a parity check, as if I thought that would go, 'hey, I found a bunch of data, let me add that back'.  It's got 22 hours to go, but I'm doubtful it'll result in any benefit.

 

So I need to determine if there is any data still on the drives for me to recover. If so, I'd like to do that. If not, then I'll just move the motherboard to the new chassis and start a brand new array with different drives.

 

How do I determine if I am SoL or if I have data to recover? Power down the server and check each drive individually in another computer using UFS Explorer or another recovery type app?

 

 

Thanks in advance

 

tower-diagnostics-20201122-1833.zip

[trurl]

Drives seem to be mounted and mostly empty. Since you rebooted syslog can't tell us anything about what you might have done to get to this point. Did it ever tell you there were unmountable disks present?

[CaptainMorganCrunch]

Just now, trurl said:

Drives seem to be mounted and mostly empty. Since you rebooted syslog can't tell us anything about what you might have done to get to this point. Did it ever tell you there were unmountable disks present?

No, at no time did I see any issues with hard drives.  But I didn't do anything before rebooting (I'm sure that's said all the time). I suspect whatever shenanigans happened to the data, it happened in July, not today.

[trurl]

Parity check isn't going to magically find anything, all it does is read the bits of all disks to get the result of the parity calculation and compares it to the parity bits. Parity is just a bunch of bits and doesn't know anything at all about files.

 

And, of course, parity is no substitute for backups, whether Unraid or some RAID solution. Do you have any backups?

 

How important was this data?

[CaptainMorganCrunch]

The video's and music I'm sure are not going to result in tears, but maybe the pictures.  

 

At this point, I have a suspicion that I moved the data over to either a FreeNAS or OMV server which may or may not have been pillaged.  I have a bunch of extra PC's, chassis and hard drives and went through various periods of planning for different purposes on different platforms (ie, ESXi, FreeNAS, unRaid, etc).  Normally, I'd put a post-it note on work-in-progress type stuff when I get an interruption, but I didn't have any.  So either I forgot, or they just fell off and got tossed by the cleaners.

 

So I found a PC that had 3x8TB drives. When one was connected and attempted boot, it gave a warning it was a FreeNAS data drive.  Unfortunately, it didn't have a USB or SSD for FreeNAS OS with the case, so I quickly installed TruNAS to see if the storage pool would just appear, but it didn't.  I do think I played with OMV once or twice, so I think its possible and will install that to the 3 HDD PC to see if it finds it.  There's also various large external hard drives kicking around that may contain the data.

 

tl;dr 95% certain its PEBKAC, forgetting where I left off on a project in progress and more than likely migrated the data off to an (un)safe location that was promptly forgotten about... *sigh*  Unrelated, I did invest in several labelers since, so I hope to avoid careless management in the future.  Definitely have this event burned into my cerebral cortex as a muscle memory warning in the future.

 

@trurl

I appreciate your time to read and suggest possibilities. You can't fix stupid.   Thanks