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Forum Discussion
The option "keep existing files" deleted my whole NAS 2.5TB!
I just bought another (already have one up and running) ReadyNAS Ultra 4 with 4 HD's of 2TB each + 2 Replicate licenses for the purpose of backing up my first NAS which has the same specs. On the firs...
Hi Vandermerwe,
I have submitted an online ticket at Netgears support page but havnt got any answer yet.
I have also been in contact with an "advanced" user here on the forums through PM's that have asked a jedi for help, but havnt got any answer from the jedi yet so I have been advised to use the "Need immediate help?" post at the top of this forum. I will do this shortly.
I'll share some lines from that PM conversation just to give you all some updates on the issue (the italic part is my words and the quoted frames is his answers):
I find it hard to believe that the restore process, that only ran for a couple of minutes before I canceled the process, really has overwritten 2.5 TB of data on those minutes. I believe it just altered the "TOC" of the volume on the NAS and that most of the data could still be there on the disks, just not visible cause there is no longer a reference to the data in the TOC. What do you think?
Worth mention is also that I expanded this NAS from 4x500GB to 4x2TB disks 6 months ago and those old 500 GB disks have not been altered with since. If there is no possible way of retrieving the data that was lost, maybe these 6 months old 500 GB disks could be used to restore data from that point in time. That would still be millions times better than nothing. I have searched here on the forums about this and it seems there is not possible to just put these 4 old disks in a NAS and fire it up and expect it to work. If I have understood this right, the problem is that the expanding process is done one disk at a time, so these disks may no longer be in sync.
But someone on the forums said one could try and mount these in a linux based system and hopefully be able to read some data from them. Here is a link: http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=306
I have submitted an online ticket at Netgears support page but havnt got any answer yet.
I have also been in contact with an "advanced" user here on the forums through PM's that have asked a jedi for help, but havnt got any answer from the jedi yet so I have been advised to use the "Need immediate help?" post at the top of this forum. I will do this shortly.
I'll share some lines from that PM conversation just to give you all some updates on the issue (the italic part is my words and the quoted frames is his answers):
I find it hard to believe that the restore process, that only ran for a couple of minutes before I canceled the process, really has overwritten 2.5 TB of data on those minutes. I believe it just altered the "TOC" of the volume on the NAS and that most of the data could still be there on the disks, just not visible cause there is no longer a reference to the data in the TOC. What do you think?
It wouldn't have overwritten the data, just deleted it. Still would be enough to make data recovery difficult at best and most likely impossible.
Worth mention is also that I expanded this NAS from 4x500GB to 4x2TB disks 6 months ago and those old 500 GB disks have not been altered with since. If there is no possible way of retrieving the data that was lost, maybe these 6 months old 500 GB disks could be used to restore data from that point in time. That would still be millions times better than nothing. I have searched here on the forums about this and it seems there is not possible to just put these 4 old disks in a NAS and fire it up and expect it to work. If I have understood this right, the problem is that the expanding process is done one disk at a time, so these disks may no longer be in sync.
Yes. Not maybe no longer in sync, definitely no longer in sync. Unless you removed all the old disks at the same time they'd be useless for recovering your data now.
But someone on the forums said one could try and mount these in a linux based system and hopefully be able to read some data from them. Here is a link: http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=306
Your current array might be able to be mounted that way, and you could try running some recovery utilities on it.
One option would be to clone the disks using dd_rescue that way if you make a mistake after cloning the disks you may still have some chance of recovering some data.
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