Recovering Destroyed ZFS Storage Pools

Data recovery in case of severely damaged ZFS pools which were accidentally formatted or destroyed and therefore can no longer be mounted.

There are two capabilities for ZFS data recovery in ReclaiMe Pro

  • ZFS filesystem recovery for a healthy or slightly damaged ZFS pools. These are cases where ZFS pool metadata is not damaged and only filesystem metadata is bad. The overall ZFS recovery process for such cases is described at this page.
  • Complex cases where ZFS pool metadata is severely damaged or just incorrect due to, for example, complete pool destruction, accidentally or on-purpose. In such cases, you have a bunch of ZFS pool disks which do store data but data extraction is possible only after ZFS pool configuration is detected. Among the parameters are:
    • layout type — stripe, mirror, RAIDz, RAID2z,
    • disk count including missing disks detection,
    • disk order,
    • ZFS block size for RAIDz and RAID2z layouts,
    • pointers to main nodes so called ZFS datasets.

ReclaiMe Pro can recover ZFS pool configurations for a disk set — just connect ZFS disks to a PC running Windows, select them and use the Find ZFS capability.

Initial scan. At this stage ReclaiMe Pro reads data from all the disks and collects ZFS metadata records for further analyses.

Testing. ReclaiMe Pro analyzes all the ZFS metadata records found trying to detect ZFS volume parameters.

Recovering damaged ZFS configuration in ReclaiMe Pro.

Reconstructed volumes. Based on the metadata found and analyzed, ReclaiMe Pro reconstructs a ZFS volume. The Save RAID XML button allows to save the reconstructed ZFS pool configuration to the XML file; loading the XML file at start allows you to continue ZFS recovery from the point of displaying the reconstructed volume. The Open data sets button launches the process of gathering statistics on found data sets.

Data sets processing. ReclaiMe Pro analyzes all found ZFS datasets records and gathers dataset statistics like file and directory counts and total dataset size. The Show data sets button pauses the data sets analysis process and displays all the data sets processed. The software displays ZFS data sets along with the statistics; the data sets are ordered by the generation number (TXG) which is „the higher the TXG, the newer the set“.

For a recovered data sets, ReclaiMe Pro allows to:

  • Save config (selected or all) to a configuration file which can be then loaded to ReclaiMe Pro at start for further work.
  • Recover data from a selected data set that is perform ZFS filesystem recovery which brings files and folders.
Recovering data from a damaged ZFS pool in ReclaiMe Pro.