RAIDZ Recovery
ZFS is an open-source filesystem that is primarily used on FreeNAS and NAS4Free storage systems.
When developing ZFS, the main goal was reliability, which is achieved through different features like copy-on-write, redundant metadata, journaling, and others.
ZFS uses its own technology for combining disks into a single storage — RAIDZ, which, on the one hand, is fundamentally similar to the RAID technology,
but on the other hand, has a number of significant differences.
Therefore, ordinary data recovery software is not suitable for RAIDZ recovery.
ZFS filesystem is a hybrid of disk space manager and regular filesystem meaning that you cannot format non-ZFS oriented data storage,
be it a single disk or a RAID, to ZFS filesystem. First you need to add the storage to a ZFS pool which can be one of the following types:
- RAID-Z0 — no redundancy, recovery is possible only with all disks,
- RAID-Z1 — recovery is possible with one disk missing,
- RAID-Z2 — recovery is possible with two disks missing,
- RAID-Z3 — recovery is possible with three disks missing.
RAIDZ Recovery with ReclaiMe Pro software
- Connect all available disks from the broken ZFS pool.
- Download, install and run ReclaiMe Pro software.
- Check ZFS under the Target partition types.
- Select ZFS volume and click Start scan. If you do not see your ZFS volume,
try deep ZFS recovery with the Find ZFS capability. For this refer to
the page.
- Estimate the recovery result using the Preview function for files, preferably images
like jpg, png, or tiff.
- Save the recovered files to the prepared storage device.