HELP ME, I've lost 2.5TB of data (I think)

[benwoony]

Hi,

I've just installed FreeNAS. I saw my USB 3TB disk with 2.5TB worth of data on it, so I created a volume out of this. Now, I can't see the disk when I mount it on Windows. HELP. I can't afford to lose my data.

My FreeNAS is running in a VMware guest OS.
I'm sure the Add Volume probably rewrote the disk header, but I need to recover. What can I do??

ben

 

[cyberjock]

Well, since you use VMWare there's many ways that this could have gone. It really doesn't matter as the data that is recoverable will still be recoverable as long as you don't go trying to reformatting the drive. Anything you do to write to the disk will decrease the chances and amount of data you can recover. In any case I'd start looking at data recovery tools. One I've seen work well is called r-studio. I believe the free version can do a scan and show you what it can recover, but I think you'll have to pay for it to actually recover data. Do keep in mind that you will have to recover to a different disk, so you will need another hard drive to recover to.

If you don't have luck with that then I'd call a data recovery company and see how much. Last time I got a quote for someone the quote was for just over $2000 and was a flat fee regardless of drive size.

I've moved this to off-topic since it's not a support question for FreeNAS.

You are correct that you most likely lost the data(I'm not saying some/most isn't recoverable) when you created the volume. The drives are supposed to be empty because creating a volume creates a new partition table(which makes all pointers to your data and the file system go away).

 

[benwoony]

cyberjock,

What are the commands that are used in the background to create the ufs volume?

thanks

ben