Critical storage issues

[l@e]

My opinion first thing to do grab all the important data from the box and put in local pc or laptop or ext hdd you have. Recorvering the box and understanding reasons why that happened can take longer time and in that meantime the risk is only geting higher of losing the pool contents. We build and use FN to keep data, so data is more important not the box it self. You can correct your build or even get a new one, but no one can restore your data loss. By the way is very important to do a peoper diagnose why this happened in order to correct in future, may be bad model of drive, cables, psu etc , there are a lot in equation. Please share after you get some idea on what coused that so others with similar problems in future or new builders to avoid.

 

[Ericloewe]

I have to agree that gathering as much information as possible before telling people what to do is the best option, in principle.

Even something as benign as "oh, you have a port free, just plug in the new drive and resilver with no loss of redundancy" can backfire if the server crashes because hot-plugging the disk causes a brownout because the disk was connected straight to a cable and not a backplane connector that allows for the disk's inrush-limiting circuitry to work.

Rash action is an excellent way of turning a small problem into a big one, so let's all try to get the complete picture before throwing in the first two cents in our pockets.

 

[jgreco]

Considering there is no way to know which of the two scenarios will happen in such a case, I consider both ways are good. This is also the very purpose of such a forum : when there is more than one option, a forum like this helps one to realize about all of them thanks to the opinion expressed by different people.

Unfortunately, we've seen people follow bad advice posted here, so there's a frequent tendency to push back on potentially bad advice. Unless a situation is actively worsening as the minutes go on, stopping to ask some reasonable questions to frame the nature of the problem is prudent. All of the long-time posters here who are answering questions share an expectation that your data is valuable and that taking risks with it is irresponsible, because users who invest in the resources to use FreeNAS and ZFS with its data protection features probably want that. Unfortunately, each of us has seen cases where bad advice was given by someone who didn't take the time to fully assess the issue, and in some cases had that acted on by the user experiencing a problem, creating a larger problem or actually risking data. Many of the users in this forum come here because they do not have sufficient expertise to properly vet various courses of action, so this is a nontrivial issue.