Help with over written volume?

[rottindog]

Core 2 Duo
Gigabyte GA-G41MT-DV3
8 gigs Ram
2-2TB hard Drives in a zfs Raid
Freenas 8.2 rc1 x64 on an 8 gig usb stick

I've posted this on the noob section and only got one response so I thought id try here.

I had a zfs raid set up originally (listed above). When accessing my files freenas would crash so I installed a 2.0tb drive and configured it as a zfs. I managed to ztp into my raid and transfer everything to another computer and then transfer back to my new drive. All worked very well and I had no problems with this drive and freenas was working just fine. I wanted to erase my original raid and try it again because the hard drives tested ok and I thought it wasn't a hardware issue. When trying to dismount the disks or erase them (the raid) freenas would crash so instead I thought I would reinstall a fresh copy of freenas on my usb and import the new 2.0tb hard drive with the files and then redo my raid. Instead of "auto importing" the new 2.0tb drive(volume) (with my files) i created a volume instead. Now freenas see's my it as 1.8tb drive with 0% used and there are no files.

What I want to know is if there is a way of going back because I don't think any files were over written. Or if that's not possible are there any tools that can go through the drive and find files at a lower level. I'm more familiar and windows and know there are tools that you can use to access a damaged or an overwritten drive and retrieve files. Is this possible with zfs?

Thx again for the help. I'm new to freenas and am very worried that my files are lost. I have about 1tb worth of files on that hard drive and they are very important to me.

 

[cyberjock]

Several other people have made similar mistakes. It's damn near impossible to get your data back. That's why backups are so important ;). Nobody that has made mistakes like yours has actually recovered their data.

I know, reminding people to make a backup after they made a mistake is a little too late.

 

[rottindog]

Thx for the reply. The sad thing is that drive was my backup.

Not sure if this next comment makes sense or not (I'm not very knowledgable on zfs). But why is it that the files are gone in this case. In an fat format files aren't gone until they've been written over even if deleted. I've never had to recover files before but I know that there are programs in a windows environment that can be used to retrieve lost or deleted data even for a failed drive.

I'm going to try freenas again because I keep hearing good things about it but so far I'm a little frustrated. First my raidz failed and I couldn't figure out why and now I screw up my backup drive by mistake.

Thx again for the reply.

 

[Stephens]

You can recover on Windows because the tools are there. The tools don't exist for ZFS. Are they possible? I've seen some tech talk that implies they are -- at least to some degree. But software doesn't write itself. For whatever reason, the people technically capable enough to do this haven't decided it's worth doing more than whatever they're currently doing (spending time with family, working on other projects, watching TV, whatever).

That said, read up on ZFS snapshots and rsync.

 

[cyberjock]

Exactly what Stephens said. My theory is that ZFS is targeted for large scale business environments. In those environments well maintained backups will be virtually a given. Why would you risk recovering corrupted data when you can recover from known good files?

There simply is no business model where unformatting/undeleting ZFS data is a profitable business.

 

[rottindog]

Thx everyone it's been a lesson well learned.