* * URGENT * * Please Help - I've deleted/formatted 2 of my External/USB Drives...

[new2freenas]

...and need to recover the data.

Is this possible, and if yes, then how would I best go about it?

This was my first time installing FreeNAS and I didn't realize that I had to perform a "Volume Import" in order to use my drives "as is" and retain the existing data.

I guess I selected a wrong option and both of my drives are now blank/formatted.

I do hope I can get back all my data...without having to shell out a ton of money (having the data recovered professionally).

Thanks guys.


FreeNAS Noob

 

[HolyK]

What kind of filesystem was on the disc(s)? They were in raid0/1 or separated? Are you able to get them out from the box? And what exactly you did?

 

[cyberjock]

If you used ZFS your recovery options are about zero, regardless of money. There really are no recovery tools for zpools and I haven't seen any professional recovery companies that will give a quote for zpool recovery. My guess is that since ZFS is designed for enterprise class use the expectation is that any company in their right mind wouldn't make foolish mistakes and would have religious backups elsewhere making recovery a bad option. Remember that doing data recovery on hard drives doesn't guarantee good files, and what company really wants to recovery large amounts of data that have to be verified to not be corrupt? It's just smarter and easier for companies to restore from backup and be done with the situation.

For us schmucks that use ZFS at home(I'm in this category too), we're somewhat outside of what ZFS was designed for. So we pretty much have to cover our own butts.

There's a reason why I had the comment about backups in my sig. Far too many people don't value backups and lose stuff they can never get back.

 

[new2freenas]

What kind of filesystem was on the disc(s)? They were in raid0/1 or separated? Are you able to get them out from the box? And what exactly you did?

I believe they were either NTFS or FAT32...perhaps one of each.

They are external (USB) HDDs....so they are outside the case/box.

 

[new2freenas]

Yes, I believe I did use ZFS...so I guess I'm dead in the water (based on what you say).

Oh well! I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and get on with life :(

Thanks for your reply

 

[cyberjock]

If you used NTFS with FreeBSD you are crazy. NTFS support is not recommeneded in any way, shape, or form, except for copying data to another partition. It's very unreliable.

FAT32 is a very crappy and horribly unreliable file system. It has no journal so file corruption is quite common. Back with Windows 98 if you didn't do a proper shutdown you would have an inconsistent file system forcing a checkdisk during bootup. I'm not even sure how "good" FAT32 support is with FreeBSD. But FAT32 has a rather small disk size cap.

 

[new2freenas]

If you used NTFS with FreeBSD you are crazy. NTFS support is not recommeneded in any way, shape, or form, except for copying data to another partition. It's very unreliable.

FAT32 is a very crappy and horribly unreliable file system. It has no journal so file corruption is quite common. Back with Windows 98 if you didn't do a proper shutdown you would have an inconsistent file system forcing a checkdisk during bootup. I'm not even sure how "good" FAT32 support is with FreeBSD. But FAT32 has a rather small disk size cap.

Well, as it turns out...these were USB drives that I was using with my Windoze machines....and more recently with various flavors of Linux...and decided (foolishly I guess...but how would I know anyways, when this is my first encounter with FreeNAS/FreeBSD) that I would attach these drives "as-is" to my FreeNAS machine and access them from any machine in the house...no problems.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, not the best choice to use anything except UFS and ZFS with FreebSD.

It's also a bad idea to use USB with drives that will be permanently attached to the server. One bump with a power or USB cable on accident and you can see complete data loss. This happens so frequently from people that said "its in the corner of my basement and nobody will ever go near it.. i'm safe" then days later are asking if they can recover that when people mention using USB for anything except copying data to the server I try to sway them away from it.

Anyway, sorry about your loss. I highly recommend(if you chose to stick with FreeNAS):

1. Use internal drives only.
2. Use ZFS with RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2
3. Do religious backups. ZFS has built in backups(replication).

The really crappy part of this whole learning experience. I bet you'd paypal me $300 if I had a guaranteed way to recover your data. But you weren't willing to spend $300 for a couple more hard disks for a backup.

I've seen this regularly for more than 10 years and its disappointing. I know why people do it(I've done it). It's a risk versus benefit. You think you're safe and so you take the risk. You might win and save yourself $300. But when you lose, you lose big.

ZFS really is awesome and (in my opinion) far more trustworthy with my data than any other file system out there. BTRFS has potential to be a good competitor with ZFS for reliability, but its still quite buggy and not recommended. Who knows, maybe in 2 years we'll all be talking about how great BTRFS is.

 

[HolyK]

I guess we are all looking at the problem from too much advanced perspective.

Maybe i am wrong but i guess the situation is simple like this:
- He had two external drives (NTFS/FAT)
- He tried to connect them to FreeNAS and attach them to see data
- He screwed partition definition, but i guess he did not done write-zero/secure rewrite of the whole disc. So i guess data are physically still on the discs, but he is not able to access them now. If this is true, it should not be a big problem to restore...

Anyway, i am more Windows than Unix guy, so i can recommend two ways how to (possible) fix this from Windows. But first ... I asked if you can remove the disc from the external box. You need to remove them from whatever external USB box you have and connect them physically to SATA port in your desktop. The reason is that the USB is just "stupid" interface and you don't have full access from the lower level perspective. After you will achieve this, you may try following...

1) First one is easy, but hard to say if this will work (usually its not, but you might be lucky, or you can skip this and go for second way)... Just get Partition magic and there is a function which will try to recreate partition data. Do not mess with that more than you need. If this will not work (PMagic will see nothing so you will be not able to recreate), just stop and try second way...

2) There is a outstanding soft called "GetDataBack" for NTFS / FAT and i have very good experience with that. It is very intuitive so i will not write step by step manual how to use it (there are dozens how-to guides, videos, articles, just gooogle it !) .., just a few notes:
- You NEED to have disc physically connected to your ATA/SATA port, so NOT via USB!!
- That disc MUST be visible in windows device manager, but DO NOT allow windows to format/repartition!! (If the partition is screwed, Windows will ask you to format it before use .. DO NOT DO THIS!)
- Free version will allow you to do sector scan, but will NOT ALLOW YOU RESTORE !! So for your purpose, you need full version (how you will get this is up to you)
- You need enough space on another physical disc(s) to which you will export data. Thing is that the GDB is working as Read-Only mode (to avoid any changes/corruptions), so it will analyze/scan the "broken" drive and then it will allow you to export any found data to another disc. So if you had like 800GB data on the screwed drive, you will need another disc (or more discs) with at least 800GB to which you will export.
- It is very time consuming. It is NOT like " *puf* and everything is fixed " magic... hard to determine, but for 1TB drive it could be something about 3-4 hours for the scanning and again 3-4hours for exporting/copying the data. Plus something like 1-2 hours for all of the middle steps.

Good luck and next time please read Documentation carefully :]