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Would really appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction.

Today at work we found out our Synology box had its motherboard go. From what I can tell, it was set up with two 8TB drives in RAID 1 (Drives A and B), with a third 8TB (Drive C) added a few months later.

I believe these were BTRFS drives set up in a 'mdadm' Linux raid.

I was able to successfully mount them in a PC using an Ubuntu live USB and these instructions: https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/How_can_I_recover_data_from_my_DiskStation_using_a_PC

After lunch I got dumb, apparently.

As a temporary solution to file sharing within the company, I decided to install Ubuntu on a spare SSD and set up NextCloud.

All was going well, until I mistakenly allowed NextCloud use /sdb2 (Drive A), a RAID 1 drive from the NAS, as its storage drive... stupid stupid stupid. Guess I thought it was... something else?

Now one of the RAID 1 drives is formatted ZFS (Drive A). The other (Drive B) I believe is still BTRFS, but I cannot mount it, mdadm --examine says it's missing a superblock. mdadm

Question: Is there any way to (somewhat safely) either recover the data or miraculously rebuild the ZFS drive as BTRFS? Obviously not much data has been written to the ZFS drive yet...

Please note that while my info should be correct, I did not build the NAS system myself, it was been pieced together by a less techy superior - I might be wrong about some Synology-specific practices.

Thank you so much.

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  • You'll need to likely pull one of the drives of the former array, connect it to another computer that can read BTRFS, and run standard data recovery procedures on it. If the data was valuable, you should find professionals to do this. For getting it back to BTRFS, does Synology have a Disk Initialization process?
    – music2myear
    Commented Aug 27, 2020 at 3:56

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There is a simpler way IF your NAS and drives meet the following conditions:

  1. All 3 drives, A, B, & C are in the same NAS volume
  2. You had RAID 1 setup properly across all 3 drives
  3. You only reformatted/corrupted/deleted data on a single drive. The other two drives are unaltered.
  4. You have a new or repaired Synology NAS available to you

The single drive that was accidentally reformatted as a ZFS drive if put back into the NAS would appear as Degraded if it shows up at all.

The other two NAS drives have all the data needed rebuild the Degraded drive.

I suggest again reformatting the ZFS drive to maybe NTFS, like a brand new drive would be formatted out of the box. Now think of this as a virgin NEW disk.

Install all 3 drives back into the repaired or new Synology NAS.

Tell the NAS to expand your Storage Pool and Volume to include the NEW disk and let the Synology rebuild the entire array.

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