RAIDZ Recovery

ZFS is an open-source filesystem that is primarily used on TrueNAS (formerly known as 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

  1. Connect all available disks from the broken ZFS pool.
  2. Download, install and run ReclaiMe Pro software.
  3. Check ZFS under the Target partition types.
    4. RAIDZ recovery
  4. 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.
    5. Recovering data from a ZFS volume in ReclaiMe Pro.
  5. Estimate the recovery result using the Preview function for files, preferably images like jpg, png, or tiff.
  6. Save the recovered files to the prepared storage device.