Deleted/Vanished Files Help?

[irontamoor]

Hello All,
I know BACKUPS are essential. I never had the money to do a backup, so this machine only gets turned on when needed; now I'm doing it, but as the saying goes too long, too late. In Advance, thank you to everyone who will help.

I think I deleted files, now long story short, I don't know how much data I used to have. I believe it's around 3TB as my zfs on the proxmox shows 3TB used out of 5TB.
But a few days/weeks ago, I think I delete something within the dataset, not the dataset, but something within it. When I did, I checked, and I could see my folders which I can still see (stupid, I didn't check the files, only folders ).
Today I say I only have 500GB on my TrueNAS; I then checked my data, and all my old data files, not folders, files, which like before 2019, are not showing.

The whole structure is there, but not the files; the files are gone.

Any way to recover the data files? Or what has happened? Can I mount the qcow2 to a ubuntu image and use TestDisk?

System;
CPU: 16 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 v4 @ 1.70GHz (2 Sockets)
RAM: 256GB
Running Proxmox OS on an NVME
6 * 8TB HDD in zfs Mirrored (mirror-0 then mirror-1 then mirror-2)

Virtualised TrueNas;
CPU: 4 Cores
RAM: 32GB
OS HDD is a virtual qcow2; 20gb sitting on NVME
Data HDD is a virtual qcow2; 5TB sitting on the zfs

 

[Samuel Tai]

Unfortunately, this is an all too-common story of data loss with virtual disks.

"Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some specific things known to be problematic ----] [---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post discussing how to deploy a small FreeNAS VM instance for basic file...

www.truenas.com

The only proven way not to lose data with a virtualized TrueNAS is to passthrough an HBA, and connect real disks to the HBA.
Virtual disks will eventually become corrupted and fail.
Passing through single disks will eventually become corrupted and fail.

You can try recovering your qcow2 ZFS disk somewhere else. Without backups, your chances, however, are slim to none. You may want to look into Klennet ZFS Recovery, which has some success in reconstructing corrupt disk images.