Lost Data - VMWare deleted contents of datastore. It's still on the SAN i pray

[Ryan Messner]

Was removing old SAN connections off a host and added new dynamic identifier at the same time. Then I went and was deleting expired storage containers and vsphere did an auto refresh and deleted the disconnected storage containers while it added the new ones from the FreeNAS SAN, I inadvertently deleted my fileserver store and right now it is empty after rescans of the HBA in vmware.

Due to nature of ZFS i know the data is still there, but how can i recover it. I have no snapshots prior (only created a two after the disaster) and I can't roll back to them because FreeNAS says cannot rollback 'FILESERVERStore' dataset is busy. I'm too scared to reboot the SAN and try a restore after, I want to maintain as much of this in its exact state as possible.

Any insight anyone can shed would be greatly appreciated. I have to be abel to recover this. I don't care if 3rd party specialist need to get involved, i'm open to recommendations.

Thank you to anyone involved and yes I know I should have backups

 

[rs225]

If recovery is possible, you would need to shut down the pool to stop any further writes. Even then, you are looking at a very expensive recovery. ZFS does overwrite freed space, just not instantly, or even predictably. Snapshots would be different.

The general advice is going to be restore from backup, or rebuild from scratch on a new pool (since you want to preserve the prior for potential recovery).

 

[rs225]

If you are thinking that you can get a recovery from the VMFS5 volume inside the zvol, then that could be possible, but you'll need some expert advice from somebody on VMFS. So hang on to the snapshots, since that would be the source material.