Need to recover Files from ZFS Drives

[Will Armitt]

[Solved]

Hi all,
I had two drives connected to my nas and I used ZFS to create them, I need to recover the files from these drives as the old pc I used for freeNAS has died and I do not have another available to setup.
If it is of any help I was using one drive connected via SATA and one via USB. Am I able to recover anything or have I lost it all?

 

[Jason Hamilton]

It might be worth a shot to try and build a VM of freenas and attach your USB drive to the VM and see if it will discover the zfs partition. I am no freenas expert but it might be worth exploring.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

 

[lindaleee]

As long as your data has not been overwritten, you will have a great chance to recover it. There are some freewares on the Internet, you can have a try, for example TestDisk. If you have some important .doc files or excel, ppt files, you can read this restore .doc files article to find more method and learn more about data recovery.

 

[cyberjock]

First, trying to recover your zpool from a VM.. bad idea. Not every sure

Second, if you read about Testdisk(and every single other data recovery tool out there.. NONE do ZFS. PERIOD). I don't even have to look it up to know it doesn't do ZFS. Nobody in the industry does ZFS for less than 5-figures, and there is no software options offered. You roll with the big dogs and lose, you pay up if you don't do backups. ANd you pay up bigtime.

You should be able to take your drives, plug them into a temporary system and import the pools per the manual. Setup a quick file share and you'll be able to copy the contents of very easily.

 

[Will Armitt]

Thanks everyone,
I ended up putting the drives in a temp system and copied them over. thanks for your help.

 

[Knowltey]

As long as your data has not been overwritten, you will have a great chance to recover it. There are some freewares on the Internet, you can have a try, for example TestDisk. If you have some important .doc files or excel, ppt files, you can read this restore .doc files article to find more method and learn more about data recovery.

Lindalee, that .doc guide that you posted is made with an NTFS file system in mind. FreeNAS uses ZFS (and in some cases UFS, but in this case the user was using ZFS). ZFS is an entirely different beast from NTFS, and since it's also an "enterprise" filesystem there aren't any readily available or cheap methods of data recovery from hard disks that are runnign a ZFS filessytem since any enterprise worth their salt would simply just restore the data from their known good backups. If you're using an enterprise data storage solution such as ZFS you should be thinking and treating it just like an enterprise IT administrator.