How to recover my freenas drive

[Steven E. L.]

Hello all,

Sorry if this has been asked,

I'm new to Freenas. Around one and a half to two years ago, I tried installing Freenas to an old computer, and hey, it works. I installed it into a USB drive, and used an old hard drive for the data. I forgot what version of Freenas it was (since I cannot access the Freenas anymore). I used ZFS filesystem for the data.

Then, I just kept adding files to the Freenas data drive, and not paying any attention, suddenly the Harddrive was full (160GB). I cannot even delete files anymore from it (supposedly need freespace even to delete). Now I should have copied all the files to another computer right then, but I didn't. I tried to restart Freenas, and it did not want to boot. From then on, the Freenas computer would not boot at all.

I tried to take the Freenas data harddrive out can access it in another computer, just to salvage the data, but I found out that Windows cannot read ZFS filesystem.

So, what is the best way for me to get my data back right now?

Thanks in advance

 

[Bidule0hm]

Well, you did so many things wrong that you'll be really lucky if you can get your data back.

First: why use ZFS with a single drive? it defeats the whole purpose of ZFS.

Second: ZFS is a copy on write file system so it needs some free space to delete data, you shouldn't have exceeded 80 % usage, let alone 90 %.

Third: you didn't make any backup. No excuse, at all.

To finish: I can guess this system is probably an old desktop (so no ECC RAM, crappy MB and PSU, ...).

So, to answer the question: take another USB stick, reinstall FreeNAS (the same version you used before) and try to import the pool.

 

[SweetAndLow]

What you need to do is get new USB, install freenas 9.3 probably, try importing your pool using the GUI.

 

[Bidule0hm]

But if it was on 9.1.* I don't think it's a good idea to jump right to 9.3, no?

 

[SweetAndLow]

But if it was on 9.1.* I don't think it's a good idea to jump right to 9.3, no?

Without him knowing what version, I can only suggest 9.3 because I know it can import zfs pool with all the currently supported feature flags.

 

[Bidule0hm]

I see, and at the point where he is I guess he has nothing to lose :)

 

[Steven E. L.]

Hey guys,

Thanks for all of the replies.

Well, guilty as charged about all the mistakes. Although, in my defense, I never intended this machine to be "used," it started as an experiment, can I turn this old computer into a NAS. It's my first foray into using any kind of NAS (for my small office of a few computers), and of course I had no idea about ZFS and things like that. Once I successfully turn the old computer into a NAS, people just started using it. In hindsight, I should then have looked into how to properly back it up.

Well, I'm not holding out much hope, because someone tried to fix it already. They tried to access it using Ubuntu, installing ubuntu-zfs. But I think all it did is create a new ZFS partition on the drive, therefore it might have destroyed the original partition.
The data inside is not *critical* but still hurts to lose, so lessons learned.
Curious though, is there a way to access it from linux, or even a bsd distro? Once I read the first reply, I knew I should have just tried to build another FreeNas. Do you think I can still import data in FreeNas 9.3, even after trying to access it in Ubuntu?

 

[Bidule0hm]

If the drive has been erased there's basically one f% (yep, that's a femtopercent... :P) to recover it.

If you just tried to access it then the chances are far higher but still very low.

 

[cyberjock]

Curious though, is there a way to access it from linux, or even a bsd distro? Once I read the first reply, I knew I should have just tried to build another FreeNas. Do you think I can still import data in FreeNas 9.3, even after trying to access it in Ubuntu?

Assuming the zpool wasn't damaged, you could certainly have mounted it in ZFS on linux. I won't discuss how because things change over time and since this forum focuses on the BSD implementation I'd prefer to keep the info here to BSD. Otherwise people will misquote me later. ;)

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I should have just tried to build another FreeNas.

Try this. It's your best bet. There's an outside chance you can echo > <somelargefile> at the command-line to free up some space, or maybe even do a drive replacement with a larger drive.

it started as an experiment, can I turn this old computer into a NAS.

This is why these forums are so discouraging to people repurposing old hardware "just to try out FreeNAS". It's tends to work fine at first, and people forget that they were "just experimenting" and start putting important data on it. Then one day everything goes to the great bit bucket in the sky. Unfortunately you just became the latest poster child for this...