Storage Spaces/ReFS Failure. HELP!

DominionZA

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Recently I setup my 5 * 2B drives in a parity mode storage pool using Windows Server 2012 storage spaces.
Everything hundreds.

Then yesterday I decided to move the drives to a newer and faster Windows Server 2012 machine. What I didn't do - like a tool - was to detach the virtual disk and take the pool offline first.

So when trying to import the pool and attach the virtual disk on the new machine, all went good. The volume however got corrupted and that was that. No access to my data.

I am now running a Data Recovery using ReclaiME File Recovery and on the attached virtual drive. From what I could see - via Google - this is one of the best data recovery tools for ReFS.
It has been running since last night at currently at 40%. No files showing up yet which is confusing me. The volume being based on ReFS means chances of recovery are higher than other file systems (supposedly).

If I run recovery on each of the individual drives, it starts to pick up files within a minute or so. After a few minutes the app crashes though with an exception stating the key exists blah blah and bye bye.

What are your experiences with data recovery on a ReFS virtual disk (not using Thin Provisioning)?
Any tools better than ReclaiME File Recovery?
 
Hi There,
Sounds to me as if it is corrupted.
Can you not restore from a backup and do the move correctly?

Regards

Tim

Unfortunately backup was not in place yet.

I recently has a ZFS setup with these drives on my HP Micro server. I wanted to move to Windows Server 2012 and Storage Spaces so copied all the data to externals and spare drives around the house then made the move. All was good but the MS strained with Win Server. I setup my old Core2Duo and moved the drives there - and the volume corrupted :banghead:

I have not used the externals much so running recovery on them. Getting quite a bit of stuff back except all the family pics and movies (most critical). Recovery still running so hope is still out there.

Thankfully I had moved my SVN repo's to a dedicated server at WA and configured off site backup, so that is all safe.

I also lost 2 Dev databases, but Reclaime managed to find and recover them.

Lesson in this... Don't put off setting up offsite backups. Sigh...
 
Hi There,
A sad but hard lesson that we have all done. (makes mental note to backup phone, iPad and laptop today)

Good luck with the rest of the recovery.

Tim
 
Its totally crazy how easy storage devices become "corrupted" ... just shows you how many bugs there are in the OS's we use day to day :(
 
Its totally crazy how easy storage devices become "corrupted" ... just shows you how many bugs there are in the OS's we use day to day :(

You are correct. I was amazed.

The only ReFS recovery software I could find was ReclaiME. I struggled to get it to work so one of their developers remoted into my server, did some partition recovery magic and started the recovery. It is at about 60% now and a lot of my files are showing up - BONUS.

I am using storage spaces again, but NTFS this time. Will give ReFS until 2014 to mature.

My array was 5 x 2TB drives. 2 WD greens and 3 Seagates. One of the Seagates failed initially when they were in my HP MS using FreeNAS and ZFS. FreeNAS never reported the bad drive. It just stopped working. I managed to do a recovery on the data and moved to windows cause I was scared of FreeNAS.
When the ReclaiME peeps remoted in, they discovered another Seagate had problems and no reporting from either ReFS or storage spaces on. Sigh...

The whole point of using these techs was for incase a drive failed. Not worked for me yet. I may just use the drives as individual drives after this recovery is complete.
 
I'm fairly glad I just read this thread, as I was busy setting up something very similar to what you had, AND had the idea of moving the drives to a faster machine too. Dodged a bullet there.

I've also had experience with FreeNAS drive failure as you described. I put brand new 3*2TB drives into a ZFS pool, made sure that FreeNAS thought the drives were fine (out-of-box failure is rife nowadays), and started loading terabytes of data onto the drives. A few hours later, the first drive in the pool crashed, with so many bad sectors that the drive became unreadable.

I hope you come right with all your data recovery, and get yourself a proper solution so as not to lose data again!
 
I'm fairly glad I just read this thread, as I was busy setting up something very similar to what you had, AND had the idea of moving the drives to a faster machine too. Dodged a bullet there.

I've also had experience with FreeNAS drive failure as you described. I put brand new 3*2TB drives into a ZFS pool, made sure that FreeNAS thought the drives were fine (out-of-box failure is rife nowadays), and started loading terabytes of data onto the drives. A few hours later, the first drive in the pool crashed, with so many bad sectors that the drive became unreadable.

I hope you come right with all your data recovery, and get yourself a proper solution so as not to lose data again!

The scan finished. The most important stuff was not found. Sigh...
Running another app now to see if it will be lucky. I doubt it, but worth a try.

RAID is not a backup solution...

Aware if that. But supposed to provide redundancy.
 
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