My data loss story on RAID 1 for a free key

I am on Fedora Linux, and I was organising files to move to optical media. This is a BTRFS RAID 1 filesystem with FDE, which is shared via NFS. The permissions for this area are nobody:nobody.

I had the NFS share mounted on my laptop and was in admin mode within Nautilus (Fedora Workstation), and wanted to rename the folders, which has several files within them. After renaming (e.g. 25G-BD1 to BDR1) when I went to look at the folder, it was empty, much to my shock.

I am not sure why this happened exactly, but I can only think that the rename is essentially a move execution for the folder, and the files did not follow, maybe due to the permissions. Again, this confuses me – I was performing these process as “admin” which I suppose is just superuser and not actually root.

I later found out that doing such things over NFS within Nautilus isn’t a good idea, with permissions set as they are on the server – probably for this reason.

So I unmounted the NFS from the laptop, unmounted the disks from the server to stop as much activity as I could, and pray the CoW holds true.

As I thought about what my options were, I first looked at using testdisk but it was advised not to, and look at using BTRFS tools to recover, but I couldn’t remove/delete one mirror disk which I needed as a lifeboat to store and image of the remaining disk. BTRFS tools would not permit a removal of one half of a RAID 1 array. And I could not delete either as it would migrate back to the remaining disk, thereby causing rewrites.

So I was stuck. I needed another solution. Then I found about Hetman RAID Recovery. So I tried it out and it found the folders (and files) on the disk.

Before I went to consider a licence, I then stumbled on this reddit and realised not only did I miss out on a free licence giveaway a month or two ago, but you apparently are offering a free licence for The Partition Recovery – which as I understand it will do the job for a a single target disk from a RAID 1, and that the RAID Recovery is for more complex RAID arrays.

Needless to say, I have learnt a lesson here. I laugh at the irony that I lost my backups that I wanted to backup further (to cold storage).

I would greatly appreciate a key to restore my files. I luckily have a 1TB SDD free to restore this data to, before moving them back onto the array.

I won’t be doing what I did again, I thought it was a convenience to do things remotely but now I realise that with sensitive data I should really be on site at the server.

Thank you!