I have a readynas 104 set up with Flexraid 6 and the recycle bin feature is turned off etc. I recently accidentally deleted some files and really need to recover them. Things looked a lot easier with ext4 but with this new BTFRS file system I'm having no luck finding any software for Windows that can mount the raid so i can scan for deleted files. FYI i have powered down the NAS and removed the drives, connected them to a Windows PC. They are labelled up so i know what order they were in the NAS.
Can anyone offer any help? I have made a full backup of the raid 6 array. The array is built with 4 x 4TB drives, 50% space used.
Did you have snapshots enabled on the shares? If so, you can reinsert the disks in the NAS and recover old files from web admin ui.
I don't know of any free windows software that will do what you want. You could try ReclaiMe - trying it is free, but recovering files is not. https://www.reclaime.com/
You could also try booting up the PC with a linux live disk, and installing mdadm and btrfs.
Hi, Thanks for the reply. No snapshots are not enabled (otherwise I would have just recovered using this feature). I tried reclaime but couldnt get it to install, but to be honest i am surprised that is the only windows based software out there.
Regarding the linux method, is there a step by step guide with commands? I'm willing to try it but don't have a huge amount of Linux experience hence the guide would really help. Just to be clear, would the linux method allow me to scan for deleted files and check what they are before recovering (using a GUI) ? Listing the deleted files via command line would be a pain as i suspect there will be a lot, plus I'm not 100% sure if the files I'm looking for were actually on the NAS (long story)
Regarding the linux method, is there a step by step guide with commands? I'm willing to try it but don't have a huge amount of Linux experience hence the guide would really help. Just to be clear, would the linux method allow me to scan for deleted files and check what they are before recovering (using a GUI) ? Listing the deleted files via command line would be a pain as i suspect there will be a lot, plus I'm not 100% sure if the files I'm looking for were actually on the NAS (long story)
Thanks for the replies so far. I now have the raid volume mounted in Linux and can see all of the current data. I have a spare 8TB drive and would like to restore any deleted files to this. Is there a command i can run to just restore anything thats been deleted to this other drive without copying the current data?
It's important whichever method you use that you don't restore the files directly to the same volume that you are recovering data from. If you write to the data volume it will overwrite at least some of the deleted data further reducing the chances of data recovery.
It's also important to avoid running volume maintenance (especially defrag + balance) as some of these operations would make lots of writes to the data volume.
