Restoring formatted Freenas HDD - maybe TestDisk?

[Babo96]

Hello Community,
I'm the happy owner of a self built Freenas Server, but by upgrading via USB I accidentally made an enormous mistake, I formatted my main Storage HDD!

I know I should have done Backups etc honestly now that this happened everything is set up for that, but now my big concern is how to get my data back.

I googled and searched around the web to find a solution, there were two coming up:

Photorec - which would be my less preferred solution, I ordered a second Drive to back my data up to so it is possible, so if it is my last rescue I would also be happy to get a small help for that.

TestDisk - which sounds amazing to me a bit like "just recover deleted partitions" but when I ran TestDisk it put out many Partitions so I don't really know which one to choose, I tried a bit with the biggest ones but it didn't work yet.

Infos about my HDD(s)

Formatted Drive:
WD RED 3TB formerly used in a WD My Cloud and then transferred to my Server

Drive to back up to:
brand new WD RED 3Tb


I'm happy about any answers =D

Thanks a lot in advance Lukas

 

[zambanini]

such dir ein datenrettungsunternehmen. rechne mit 8-15.000 eur

 

[Babo96]

An sich danke für die schnelle antwort, warum allerdings so eine Antwort kommt frage ich mich schon, da die Datenrettung mit PhotoRec z.B. funktioniert aber halt sehr aufwendig ist...

 

[zambanini]

du wirst noch sehen, dass du damit kaum daten vom zfs system runterbekommen wirst.

 

[Babo96]

du wirst noch sehen, dass du damit kaum daten vom zfs system runterbekommen wirst.

Also gibt es doch noch eine konstruktive Antwort von dir? hätte ich nicht erwartet =P

Soweit ich weiß ignoriert PhotoRec das Dateisystem und sucht datein in den Blöcken der HDD und wie sieht es mit TestDisk aus?

 

[styno]

Zfs is highly fragmented by nature, I don't really see how a generic recovery program would be able to trace the blocks in a correct order and reconstruct a file. (That said, I have been wrong before so maybe you could be lucky.)

Before you do anything else to that disk, make an image with dd and work on that image.

 

[Babo96]

Zfs is highly fragmented by nature, I don't really see how a generic recovery program would be able to trace the blocks in a correct order and reconstruct a file. (That said, I have been wrong before so maybe you could be lucky.)

Before you do anything else to that disk, make an image with dd and work on that image.

Thank you for that answer, and thenk you for the dd tip I know dd but didn't think of it =D

Do you have any experience with TestDisk?

 

[styno]

Do you have any experience with TestDisk?

Not yet ;)
From your post I understand what you have two 3Tb disks in the system. How do you do that backup you are talking about?
Maybe a little more info on the system and how it is setup? (In the forum rules you'll find what info would be needed so we can help you a bit more in detail.)

 

[Babo96]

Not yet ;)
From your post I understand what you have two 3Tb disks in the system. How do you do that backup you are talking about?
Maybe a little more info on the system and how it is setup? (In the forum rules you'll find what info would be needed so we can help you a bit more in detail.)

The Backup is not my main Problem =D
But I'll tell you anyway, first I'll set up a RAID 1 on my System to have redundancy and then I'll Back up to Crashplan.

My problem is to get my Data Back



My System Specs:
4He 19" Case
i5 4670k
16gb DDR3 RAM
1* 3tb (will be 2* as soon as I got my Data back ;) )

 

[ethereal]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

i've used this before - works well but

TestDisk can undelete

• files and directory from FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 filesystem,
• files from ext2 filesystem,
• files from NTFS partition since version 6.11.

 

[styno]

1* 3tb (will be 2* as soon as I got my Data back ;) )

Ok, auch... Be prepared for the worst case scenario then...

So when you say 'formatted', what EXACTLY happened? Did it just removed the zpool or did it completely reinstalled the OS on that disk? You can always try 'zpool import -D' if the zpool was just removed.

 

[maglin]

What does the WD my cloud use? I highly doubt it's ZFS. I would guess ext4 or FAT32.

If your data that is currently unavailable is important enough I would clone that disc before doing any recovery that might be destructive.

Start with figuring out the original file format used to find out how to recover. You probably just over wrote the partition table.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Babo96]

Ok, auch... Be prepared for the worst case scenario then...

So when you say 'formatted', what EXACTLY happened? Did it just removed the zpool or did it completely reinstalled the OS on that disk? You can always try 'zpool import -D' if the zpool was just removed.

I actually installed the OS on the disk =(

 

[Babo96]

What does the WD my cloud use? I highly doubt it's ZFS. I would guess ext4 or FAT32.

If your data that is currently unavailable is important enough I would clone that disc before doing any recovery that might be destructive.

Start with figuring out the original file format used to find out how to recover. You probably just over wrote the partition table.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yes you're right WD uses Ext4 for their NAS.

So the original File System was Ext4 and then ZFS so I really wonder where all those NTFS etc Partitions listed by TestDisk are?

 

[maglin]

Well installing the OS on that drive is a no go. You have to have a separate drive for the OS. You can't run your is drive in a vdev. I'm sure some of that data is still on there but probably not worth the hassle.


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[rs225]

If you can recreate the partition table that FreeNAS had on it before, I think you might be surprised how much data you can recover. ZFS writes all important metadata twice, so it is worth the effort. Way better odds than testdisk, I suspect.

 

[Babo96]

Well installing the OS on that drive is a no go. You have to have a separate drive for the OS. You can't run your is drive in a vdev. I'm sure some of that data is still on there but probably not worth the hassle.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yeah I know that..... I had an successfull installation before and just selected the wrong drive while updating ...

 

[Babo96]

If you can recreate the partition table that FreeNAS had on it before, I think you might be surprised how much data you can recover. ZFS writes all important metadata twice, so it is worth the effort. Way better odds than testdisk, I suspect.

How do you recreate the partition table?

 

[ethereal]

why did you not upgrade via the gui ?

 

[Babo96]

why did you not upgrade via the gui ?

Yeah ..... the main problem was a bad beta Version which more or less killed the whole GUI =( and then after trying to restore the UI i failed reinstalling it so now I feel like an absolute noob =D