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Yeah, don’t panic yet. First thing: stop using that drive as much as possible. When you delete a file, it’s not immediately gone—it just gets marked as free space.
You can try:
- Checking Previous Versions (right-click folder → Restore previous versions)
- Using File History or backups (if you had it enabled)
If those don’t work, you’ll need data recovery software.
Hi all,
I messed up today and accidentally deleted a project folder on my Windows laptop. It’s not even in the Recycle Bin anymore. Is there any chance I can recover it or is it gone forever?
Background: I have a NAS (OpenMediaVault, latest major release) for storing a ton of data – mostly RAW photos. Everything I read online said to stick with mirrored pairs, so that’s what I did, with 4x12TB drives:
data partition = (A+B) + (C+D). Each disk (A-D) is 12TB.
Most of the data was copied from portable 2-5TB disks, though some was copied fresh to the NAS to free up space on my local machine. (Yes, I realize this doesn’t follow 3-2-1, but it’s where I’m at now…)
I had one disk (C) fail, but was not at all concerned because it was under warranty and I had mirrored pairs. The replacement came, and I started the resilvering process. I think the process got ~2% done before ZFS decided it didn’t trust the source disk (D), and the whole process just hung.
Before the drives failed, I realized the ~22TB of usable space would not be sufficient, so I bought 2x20TB drives to use as additional space; the goal was to add them on such that:
data partition = (A+B) + (C+D) + (E+F), where E & F are the new 20TB drives.
For better or worse, I never got that far, because I was doing the resilver before adding the new partition.
—
The AI model I consulted suggested a couple different strategies:
Attempt to recover the ‘new’ files, not found elsewhere — though now that the whole data partition is down, I’m not sure if that’s feasible. Maybe if I mount everything as read-only?
Use ddrescue to copy D->E and then …? Can I tell ZFS to treat E as D and run in a degraded state until the I can copy over the raw data? (I assume I should give up on the E+F vdev for now, even if it were a separate folder path, since I don’t want to strain the existing vdevs)
AI gives me the impression that the data on the A/B vdev is ‘safe’, though I’m not sure what that means for readability — does ZFS divide data on a per-file basis here? How would I extract data currently on the A/B vdev if C/D, and thus the data partition, is down?
—
I’m comfortable enough with ddrescue, so I hypothesize that’s my next step…I assume I’m using E as a disk (eg, ddrescue if=/dev/sdd1 of=/dev/sde1, instead of of=/mnt-of-sde1/disk.img).
Are there other options to consider? If ddrescue is the right next step, what would you do next to preserve as much data as possible before going to a 3-2-1 model?
Finally, is ZFS the right technology here, and is my topology as smart as I thought it was? I considered snapraid at one point, but was skeptical of its long-term support. However, now that I’ve (likely?) lost data, the idea of being able to read data from some disks after a failure sure seems appealing…
Hey everyone,
I accidentally deleted an important file on my Windows PC (even emptied the Recycle Bin ). Is there any way to recover it? Would really appreciate any help!
I have a Dell XPS laptop circa 2022, running Windows 11. It’s been running very well for 4 years. Last week I tried to install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) using the Powershell command wsl — install. The installation said it was successful, and upon reboot, Windows would not load. I get the message “Your device has run into a problem and couldn’t be repaired. Click or press enter to see other recovery options.”
I took it to a computer shop. He tried several different methods to recover, none of which worked. He ultimately had to re install windows. He did test all hardware and ruled out any issue with the hardware.
Anyway; I had basically a brand new computer at that point, and had to start re installing my software. I reinstalled Dropbox with no issue and recovered my files. I re installed Microsoft office, and WireGuard. Then I got to reinstalling Adobe Creative Suite. The installation said it was successful. Upon reboot, I got the “your device has run into a problem and couldn’t be repaired” again. It references a log file on the C drive, which of course I can’t access because I can’t even get to Windows.
What is likely happening? How do I stop this?
The controller of my SSD (Samsung 980 Pro…) died so I have to rebuild my setup from backups. The first step is to install PVE and on top of that PBS and update everything, then do my LUKS setup on my external RAID and recover /etc/pve from a backup.
The original setup is:
Hardware Internal Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSD (now dead) Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini hardware RAID1
Encryption at rest SSD Password luks-fa1483bd-f599-4dcf-9732-c09069472150
PV /dev/nvme0n1p3 /dev/mapper/luks-fa1483bd-f599-4dcf-9732-c09069472150
VG pve rna-mepdm-1
LV-thin YES NO
LV (size) vm-100-disk-0 (32GB) vm-100-disk-0 (801GB)
Used as CLIENT boot disk CLIENT: /mnt/ServerData (300GB) ext4 UUID:109bd659-811d-442e-9539-ebf3673d9ad3
LV vm-100-disk-1 (32GB) rna-pbs-mepdm-1 (200GB)
Used as CLIENT: /var/lib/docker UUID:a74f54a6-7a85-4c3b-839f-c034ef280d0b HOST: /mnt/pbs-backup-1 (200GB) ext4 UUID:fb75e648-561d-47a1-948c-83d9d72df80f
LVvm-100-disk-2 (500GB)
Used asCLIENT: /mnt/ServerBackup (500GB) UUID:e7639f38-e488-46fb-bd95-64c930c30603
The server data (of the single VM I am currently using) lives on the RAID, and gets backed up to a LV on the internal SSD (as well as to the cloud). I have not lost server data, I lost the internal backup of server data, but I still have one external restic backup of server data on B2.
The VM itself lives on the internal SSD and gets backed up with PBS to the RAID. I lost that VM, but I have a PBS backup on the RAID.
I had:
Code:
root@pve:~# vgs -o +lv_size,lv_name
VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree LSize LV
pve 1 6 0 wz–n- <931.01g 15.99g <794.79g data
pve 1 6 0 wz–n- <931.01g 15.99g 8.00g swap
pve 1 6 0 wz–n- <931.01g 15.99g 96.00g root
pve 1 6 0 wz–n- <931.01g 15.99g 32.00g vm-100-disk-0
pve 1 6 0 wz–n- <931.01g 15.99g 32.00g vm-100-disk-1
pve 1 6 0 wz–n- <931.01g 15.99g 500.00g vm-100-disk-2
(and the RAID entries)
After installing PVE and PBS and unlocking the external RAID I have
Code:
root@pve:~# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0 7:0 0 300G 0 loop
-loop0p1 259:4 0 300G 0 part
sda 8:0 0 1.7T 0 disk
-sda1 8:1 0 1.7T 0 part
-luks-fa1483bd-f599-4dcf-9732-c09069472150 252:5 0 1.7T 0 crypt
|-rna--mepdm--1-vm--100--disk--0 252:6 0 300G 0 lvm
-rna–mepdm–1-rna–pbs–mepdm–1 252:7 0 200G 0 lvm
nvme0n1 259:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
|-nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 1007K 0 part
|-nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 1G 0 part /boot/efi
-nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 930G 0 part
|-pve-swap 252:0 0 8G 0 lvm [SWAP]
|-pve-root 252:1 0 96G 0 lvm /
|-pve-data_tmeta 252:2 0 8.1G 0 lvm
| -pve-data 252:4 0 793.8G 0 lvm
-pve-data_tdata 252:3 0 793.8G 0 lvm
-pve-data 252:4 0 793.8G 0 lvm
I lost the internal SSD, so I lost my VM (which I should be able to restore from the PBS backup), the docker cache of the VM, and the restic backup of server data (of which I still have external backups).
Now, the bad news is that I probably have lost a .tar.gz of /etc on the pve host, and the one I still have might be from PVE 8, so before I upgraded to PVE 9 a few months ago (I hope that upgrade is not what finally killed my SSD controller for some reason, but I don’t expect it).
Basically, I need to recreate the LV thin VG and the LVs, but I recall that doing that from the command line did not work years ago when I first set it up (2022, PVE 7). What is my best way forward at this point?
Stupidly unplugged my raid 5 configured thunderbay without ejecting and now it’s showing as disk structure corrupted and raw. Can anyone here recommend a service center/technician in Houston ? Not worried about the cost, just want the best option as I need my work files back.
Would also appreciate any insight into how screwed I might or might not be. Most of the files are .3FR raw files at ~200mb, if that matters.
Thanks in advance
I have a Flatbed server that has 4 hard drives installed in a raid configuration. Now the issue I am having is to try and recover data on one of the raid hard drives.
Now I was told that if one hard drive becomes non-responsive (freezing), the entire thing is buggered.
From the community, is there another way to clone that bad hard drive and get the system to boot up or will it continue to give me problems no matter what I attempt to do???
(Update) Tried a paid iPhone data recovery tool and it actually worked! Got most of my missing photos and videos back after scanning my iPhone. Definitely a lifesaver finally.
I’d suggest trying a trusted recovery software. Most of them show a preview before you actually recover anything.
But not always. The data still exists internally until overwritten. Recovery tools just access that leftover data.
Really? I thought once deleted, it’s gone for good.
Edit: I just now got to know that there are some data recovery tools that scan your iPhone directly and try to pull deleted files. I’ve seen people recover photos, messages, and even WhatsApp chats that way. I am going to give them a try.
No backup on iTunes either 😓 I mostly relied on iCloud, which was already full.
It might still be recoverable.
When you delete files, Windows doesn’t erase them immediately—it just marks the space as available.
First things to try:
If none of that works, then you’ll need recovery software.