XigmaNAS

A few months ago I setup a nas4free box that booted off a USB key and contained 2 x 3 TB drives in a mirror ZFS format. The USB key recently died and unfortunately I had not backed up the configuration. After getting a new boot drive setup with a fresh installation of nas4free, I was hasty in trying to setup the disks. Instead of importing the disks as described here: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1271 I essentially went about recreating the configuration as if it the disks were brand new, so I'm pretty sure I reformatted both disks and added them to a new ZFS pool. Is there any hope for recovering the old data from these disks at this point? Thanks for any guidance you can provide.

doubleeh wrote:so I'm pretty sure I reformatted both disks and added them to a new ZFS pool.

if you are sure that reformated and add both disk to new pool = NO

but please try next command ( in shell or webgui)

Thanks. I had tried another reinstall of nas4free, so unfortunately there's no zpool history to show. I've certainly learned my lesson with regard to backups.

yeah, i think i learned the same (very hard) lesson as well. did the same steps you did and couldn't import my zfs volume. never found that thread that you linked. pretty bummed. movies and files that i lost isn't whats killing me.... its my 10GB of music PLUS the only pic i had of my ex-gf that was murdered by her current bf. smh.

you live and you learn. since i'm pretty much starting from scratch, i may try OpenMediaVault. I'm MUCH more comfortable w/ debian than i am w/ freeBSD.

its been a good run though....

i must say that for once, my fear finally won over!!!!!!

because i was skeptical about completely starting over, i decided that i wouldn't do so unless i was sure that all hope was lost.

just for the heck of it, i decided to try to steps as listed in the OP's link. viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1271

IT WORKED!!!!!!! my drives are now showing how much space is actually on the disk. once i am able to actually see my files, i'm going to back up EVERYTHING (like a good IT person should, smh....just like how a mechanic never fixes their own car).

I'm probably still going to use the Debian based NAS system, only because i'm more comfortable with that, but THANK YOU for your help and guidance.!!!!!!!!!

I know this is an old post, but hope that somebody out there can help me....

I too have had the problem where I have accidentally deleted a partition. During my frustration with solving another problem I reinstalled Nas4Free and must have selected the wrong hard drive by mistake. So now I have wonderful swap and install partitons on a terrabyte hdd that once contained my photo collection.

Is there any way to recover the data from what used to be a zfs partition? I have been searching around forums and sites about recovery and have not yet found anything that seems to be possible. I did find someone that will do it for a few thousand dollars, but I would prefer spending a few thousand dollars less than that.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks so much

Dunstan

ZFS is actually very difficult to kill. There is theoretically a chance you can recover your files for less than 000s USD. I appreciate the pain as I myself had to spend countless hours just recently on recovering a pool after a series of stupid user (i.e my) actions.

Some basic questions:
- what is the configuration of the pool?
- what has been written onto disk?
- what was the action sequence and what is the current state?

First thing first, you should stop whatever you're doing with that disk. Given it's a swap partition, the more you write, the more damage you will do. Shut down, boot another system, find a disk of identical size and dd (block copy) this disk to a new disk.
Second, it's worth reading ZFS spec doc (http://www.giis.co.in/Zfs_ondiskformat.pdf) to understand how the file system is laid out on disk and to understand where to look for the leftovers of the file system if there are any.