Lost photos and videos

A friend of mine was migrating his Emby system to a new all singing all dancing server that he built with Unraid, since that was what he was using originally.

During his migration to the new server and setting up the new disks with Emby, all of the photos and videos disappeared from one of the disks, leaving him with lots of photos and videos being lost.

Luckily before doing anything drastic he called me and asked if I'd come over to take a look.  So I did.

Conveniently he hadn't used his largest disk, meaning we could do a recovery, and being Linux based file systems meant this was easy to do, but would take a long while to perform the recovery.

Unraid was running from USB stick in memory.  This meant that for each recovery run the software would need to be installed again; minor issue.

The main element for helping out was to provide my friend with the knowledge to be able to do this himself.  So showing him how to;

1. Identify the Linux disk name from Unraid, where Unraid calls them Disk 1, Disk 2, etc, but clicking the disk provides the information for the /dev location - which I told him he needed to perform the recovery.

2. Install the software on Unraid, as he would need to do this for each recovery.

3. Perform the recovery.

4. Sift through 1000s of files as they may not have the correct name after recovery, especially if the directory information is unavailable.

Having found the relevant disk name for the data that had disappeared, I then stopped Unraid to free up the disks to mount using the normal Linux commands, and ensure no other processes were affecting the disks.

2 disks were required for the task.

• The disk with the missing data
• The disk that would be the recovery location

The recovery location disk was mounted to /mnt/recovery.

The application to perform the recovery is called testdisk which contains 2 methods of recovery. The more advanced testdisk command and the easier photorec command.  I opted for photorec since it did most of the grunt work for you, leaving you to supply the disk to recover and the location to recover too.  TestDisk requires more information and knowledge of the file systems you were recovering.

Having supplied photorec with the device path of the disk to recover (unmounted) and the location to recover to (mounted drive : /mnt/recovery), it went off and started the recover, and within seconds had discovered several hundred photos and videos, stating a recovery time of 24 hours, which changed as it worked through the disk.

After a day or 2 the task completed and my friend informed me that he had to sift through the 1000s of files, some of which he had no idea they were on there, and others being the files he needed.  This he was working through for quite a few days.  He has the other 4 disks to work through.