Hello,

We have recently accidentally deleted some of our MDT data.  I think its gone 
for good but looking for advice to see if there is any way to recover.  
Thoughts appreciated.

We run two LFS’s on the same set of hardware.  We didn’t set out to do this, 
but it kind of evolved.  The original setup was only a single filesystem and 
was all ZFS – MDT and OST’s.  Eventually, we had some small file workflows that 
we wanted to get better performance on.  To address this, we stood up another 
filesystem on the same hardware and used a an ldiskfs MDT.  However, since were 
already using ZFS, under the hood the storage device we build the ldisk MDT on 
comes from ZFS.  That gets presented to the OS as /dev/zd0.  We do a nightly 
backup of the MDT by cloning the ZFS dataset (this creates /dev/zd16, for 
whatever reason), snapshot the clone, mount that as ldiskfs, tar up the data 
and then destroy the snapshot and clone.  Well, occasionally this process gets 
interrupted, leaving the ZFS snapshot and clone hanging around.  This is where 
things go south.  Something happens that swaps the clone with the primary 
dataset.  ZFS says you’re working with the primary but its really the clone, 
and via versa.  This happened about a year ago and we caught it, were able to 
“zfs promote” to swap them back and move on.  More details on the ZFS and this 
mailing list here.

https://zfsonlinux.topicbox.com/groups/zfs-discuss/Tcb8a3ef663db0031-M5a79e71768b20b2389efc4a4

http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-discuss-lustre.org/2022-June/018154.html

It happened again earlier this week but we didn’t remember to check this and, 
in an effort to get the backups going again, destroyed what we thought were the 
snapshot and clone.  In reality, we destroyed the primary dataset.  Even more 
unfortunately, the stale “snapshot” was about 3 months old.  This stale 
snapshot was also preventing our MDT backups from running so we don’t have 
those to restore from either.  (I know, we need better monitoring and alerting 
on this, we learned that lesson the hard way.  We had it in place after the 
June 2022 incident, it just wasn’t working properly.)  So at the end of the 
day, the data lives on the OST’s we just can’t access it due to the lost 
metadata.  Is there any chance at data recovery.  I don’t think so but want to 
explore any options.

Darby

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  • [... Vicker, Darby J. (JSC-EG111)[Jacobs Technology, Inc.] via lustre-discuss
    • ... Andreas Dilger via lustre-discuss
      • ... Vicker, Darby J. (JSC-EG111)[Jacobs Technology, Inc.] via lustre-discuss
        • ... Andreas Dilger via lustre-discuss
          • ... Vicker, Darby J. (JSC-EG111)[Jacobs Technology, Inc.] via lustre-discuss
            • ... Vicker, Darby J. (JSC-EG111)[Jacobs Technology, Inc.] via lustre-discuss
              • ... Vicker, Darby J. (JSC-EG111)[Jacobs Technology, Inc.] via lustre-discuss
                • ... Andreas Dilger via lustre-discuss
                • ... Vicker, Darby J. (JSC-EG111)[Jacobs Technology, Inc.] via lustre-discuss
                • ... Vicker, Darby J. (JSC-EG111)[Jacobs Technology, Inc.] via lustre-discuss

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