CIFS Share no longer has data after upgrade/CIFS hanging

[ben.peterson]

Hello,
I have an odd problem that I was hoping to get some help with.... I have been running FreeNAS for roughly 1 year on an old machine - 1 75gb HDD for FreeNAS Install - 1 1tb HDD and 1 2tb HDD. I had been using it for backing up files, but mostly for running Plex. I had a folder setup called "Media" within my mounted volume (ZFS) - and I had pointed the Plex plugin to it.

I had recently had some issues with my CIFS share hanging when we would try to use it... just after I had attempted and failed to install the SickBeard plugin. I thought that maybe an upgrade to the newest version would help, so I ran the GUI upgrade. The CIFS was still not useable. I removed the CIFS share, and created a new one, and it did the same thing. Thinking that since there was still a Jail setup for Sickbeard, perhaps a fresh install of FreeNAS could restore the defaults, and fix everything.

I ran the fresh install - Auto Imported my volume (import went fairly quickly - no errors) - setup my CIFS share - and am still having the issue with it hanging.... The more frightening issue however is the little bit of time that I can get the CIFS share to work long enough to browse - my "Media" folder is still there, but is empty. When I go to my "Storage" section within FreeNAS GUI - it shows 1.2Tib used which is the same space used before I started all of this... but I can't find my data anywhere within my CIFS share. All of this makes me think that the data is still there, but will need to be "mounted" or something for me to be able to access it.

I can provide you with any Hardware information that you might need, or any output from the shell within FreeNAS if you can let me know what you need. Hopefully somebody smarter than I can give me a simple quick fix for this before I pull all of my hair out for losing all of that data.

Thank you for your time!
-Ben

 

[ben.peterson]

I should also note that ALL of my other data that I had on my drive is still there - only the Media folder is empty.

Also, my hardware specs are as follows:
FreeNAS-9.2.1.3-RELEASE-x64 (dc0c46b)
Intel Celeron D 3.06GHz
4GB RAM

 

[cyberjock]

So your box is unreliable.. and you have 4GB of RAM... color me not shocked. Please see the manual for the minimum system requirements, then upgrade to at least 8GB of RAM.

 

[ben.peterson]

I've ready the manual, and understood that I am under the suggested amount - however, I can't upgrade the RAM anymore on this box. As I stated above, this is an old machine that I wanted to throw together and see how it did, but 4GB is the max supported by the mobo. The reason I'm posting for help is because it worked flawlessly for a year now.... Yes it was a slow when running plex, but it made it happen. If it was a memory issue would it not have affected me from the start? Even right now - this is what my "Display System Processes" box is showing:

Mem: 163M Active, 82M Inact, 271M Wired, 3664k Cache, 91M Buf, 2678M Free
ARC: 8296K Total, 518K MFU, 6232K MRU, 272K Anon, 274K Header, 1000K Other
Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free

I had planned on upgrading from using this old machine and building a new FreeNAS box - however, that doesn't explain why my data is not displaying. IF the explanation for my CIFS hanging is that v. 9.2.1.3 is not able to squeak by like 8.2 did - I am fine with that.... but unless I'm mistaken - that would only cause performance issues, not loose (more like not display) data. I am sure that you get a TON of Noobs (including myself) that waste your time, so I understand you wanting a short easy answer like upgrade your system - but I don't believe that you have answered my question as I don't see how my data will just magically show up again with a machine pushing 8GB of RAM.

Thank you for your input!
-Ben

 

[meester wood]

Wasn't the original point of most NAS's to take advantage of old hardware? Dangit, we as a world need to stop producing more e-waste and the only way to do that is to stop buying crap! I've got the consumer bug in me too. I think its helpful for everyone for this to be pointed out often.

To the OP, try nas4free, as they have not upped their hardware requirements since freenas7.

 

[Dave Crenshaw]

Ben.Peterson: I think you may be able to recover (so long as you did not update your zfs pool version from version 15 in command line after pool import) by reverting back to 8.2.x and importing your volumes. At least you can then copy the data off to a backup media like DVD or tape. Upgrading to 9.x took you to a release that supports zfs feature flags and from what I have seen even if you did not upgrade zfs version requires more memory. I'd recommend staying at 8.2 until you can upgrade hardware.

Note: Nas4Free does not come free either. Yes; they coax you in with older hardware support but in reality Oracle/Solaris owns ZFS and they publish minimum hardware requirements that should be applied above and beyond any NAS solution using ZFS minimum recommendations. Nas4Free last I knew is at ZFSv28 which means a 4GB machine using ZFS will likely have Performance/data corruption errors as well in their 9.2.0 release. With that being said Nas4Free running ext will fly on 4GB RAM. ZFS wants and likes memory; biggest bang for the buck for performance on ZFS.