OUR CASES

ZFS RAIDZ2 (equivalent to RAID6) Pool Recovery

We are thrilled to share a recent success story showcasing our expertise in data recovery. Our commitment to excellence and advanced technology allowed us to successfully recover critical data for one of our valued clients.

Client Information:

  • Industry: Software Development/Technology
  • Location: San Francisco, California
  • Array Config: RAIDZ2 (10 x Samsung 990 PRO 4TB NVMe SSD)
  • Total Capacity: 32TB usable
  • Data Type:Source code repositories, development environments, and CI/CD infrastructure
System Specifications:
  • Server Configuration: Dell PowerEdge R740 (2U Rack Server)
  • CPU: Dual Intel Xeon Gold 5318Y 2.1GHz 24 Core
  • RAM: 512GB DDR4-2933 ECC Registered
  • Operating System: FreeBSD 14.0
  • ZFS Pool Configuration: Single vdev with RAIDZ2, 2 hot spares
  • File System: ZFS with advanced features (compression, deduplication, snapshots)
Initial Problem Assessment:

The customer experienced catastrophic ZFS pool failure threatening their entire software development infrastructure, including source code repositories for over 200 active projects and development environments for 150 engineers. The company faced potential loss of years of intellectual property and development work, with a critical client project deadline just one week away. The ZFS pool became completely inaccessible, preventing access to source code, build artifacts, and deployment configurations.

Technical Analysis:

The analysis revealed a complex ZFS failure involving four drive failures in the RAIDZ2 configuration. Drive failures included firmware corruption during ZFS scrub, controller failure from power instability, and NAND flash degradation from intensive development workloads. Critical ZFS metadata structures were corrupted, including pool configuration data, deduplication tables, and snapshot metadata. The pool had achieved 3.2:1 deduplication ratio and contained over 2,400 snapshots spanning 18 months of development history.

Recovery Methodology:

TheRAIDSpecialist implemented an advanced ZFS-specific recovery protocol for software development environments:

Phase 1: Drive recovery and ZFS metadata extraction
Phase 2: ZFS pool reconstruction with vdev topology restoration
Phase 3: Advanced feature recovery including deduplication and compression
Phase 4: Software development data recovery with Git repository validation
Phase 5: Development infrastructure validation and testing

Recovery Results

  • Data Recovered: 99.8%
  • Git Repositories: 247
  • Snapshots Recovered: 2,387
  • Recovery Time: 24hrs (plus time to copy the files)

Complete Recovery: 247 Git repositories with full commit histories, all build artifacts, CI/CD configurations, development environments, and complete documentation with zero loss of source code commits

Client Impact:

The successful recovery enabled our customer to meet their contractual deadline with only a 24-hour delay, preserving years of intellectual property and maintaining client relationships. Complete recovery of source code repositories and development environments enabled immediate resumption of full development productivity. The company implemented redundant ZFS pools, enhanced monitoring, and comprehensive disaster recovery testing following the incident.

Lost Data on Your Storage Device? Act Immediately!

If your are experiencing data loss, DO NOT attempt to force-rebuild RAID, reinitialize drives, or operate the system, as this can lead to irreversible data loss. Power down the device(s) immediately and keep the drives in their original slots/order. Contact our experts.

Contact us today for a free consultation!

404-312-6540

Or get your Free Online Quote Now