A few years ago all our movies and music was ripped to a 6TB Server over many long months.

That server died.

Once again we ripped, also used torrent to save ourselves a lot of time.

This time I built a 8TB file server and replicated it to a 8TB NAS.

All well and good, until I did a firmware update on the NAS and remounted the NFS share from the main server. Every thing on the NFS share has vanished.

I've run through everything I did and can't find a single reason why.

the disks on the NAS have 2 shares under the one fliesystem. One share still has its files, while the share I mounted is blank.

Any linux guys out there got any thoughts?

Not a Linux guy, but have you been using apple music at all?

(seen a lot of posts regarding the same with that last few days)

The only iDevice I own is an old iMac Lamp I rescued from a skip.

Ouch. I see all of these Unix guys losing their stuff and I'm just glad to be a #WindowsMasterRace user. <3

Seriously though, did you contact the vendors and ask them if there have been any reports of their firmware update screwing people over?

So... do you still have the files, or not? Did you just lose the backups, but the originals are still there?

I first thought you lost all the files (originals and the backups), but then I thought why would a firmware update make them both vanish?

Just curious, I don't have any solution to your actual problem (because I don't quite understand the problem).

I too have seen this, or rather something similar, happen twice. I'll explain.

I've got a self-configured home theater mini-PC running Linux. All the media content resides on a NAS which I've mounted from the mini-PC.

I used to mount with read/write permissions and I've had two incidents when I suddenly found out that all the content of my NFS share had vanished. The partition was there, the file system was there, but it looked as if someone had erased everything on it (sure wasn't me though, no one else could do it, it was behind a firewall, had no worms/viruses on any of the connected devices etc.).

To be honest I still don't know why the hell it happened. Luckily, I had backups, but it took ages to recopy everything. Twice.

I solved it by mounting the share with read-only permissions (since I only really needed read-only access from the mini-PC). I haven't had any problems since. Whenever I want to transfer things to the share I use ftp (the NAS supports that also).

I've always assumed it was a bug/glitch present in certain versions of the NFS client or server (or in certain version combinations of both).

a) Something would happen to get the mount disconnected on the mini-PC -> root mount dir would appear empty
b) *glitch* The mini-PC would re-establish connection to the NAS but assume files were in fact deleted from it since its local root mount dir is empty
c) The mini-PC would happily delete all the files on the share

Again, this is just speculation, but it's what I came up with, refusing to believe in NAS gremlins.

Of course, in your case it's also very likely the firmware update had something to do with it, if you've never seen this happen before.

first thing I'd do is STOP using the NAS for anything. Second thing I'd do is get r-studio and do a image (r-studio scanning the disks to find files) of the disks. For this, you need 8 TB (although if you can grab from a couple drives, it'll work). This will take a while PER drive. Once finished (save the files r-studio makes onto another drive and make sure ALL filestructures are checked before scanning), open the partition that is the LARGEST and start hunting in folders for your files. You may find files under extra found files with a $ and a #. I did this and was able to recover quite a bit of data off a HDD. I'm no linux guy and what I suggested will probably work in Windows (or linux for $$$) but it might find the files.

Well, we can rule out that then. figured it was worth a thought at least.

I let my iCloud account lapse and the iMac lamp stole my electricity.

Never really used a NAS for backups (or RAID for that matter) so can't really diagnose what could have gone wrong with thatt.

For my backup needs, I use replication with MongoDB and GridFS between 2 cheap computers. Obviously, that would be my recommendation. You don't even need to be a programmer to use GridFS if you are handy on the command line (there is a command line tool for it).

I suppose that if all you need is data replication and not availability, 2 MongoDB instances on the same computer using separate harddrives would work as well.

The only thing coming to mind for me is how linux mounts filesystems. The mount point usually gets overridden so anything that was there before would not be visible while the mount is present. Often this is why empty directories are used.

In recent years a few FS mounting schemes allow you to mount multiple filesystems layering the so they are all present, but this can be messy.

Beyond suggesting checking that you don't have 2 filesystems mounted on the same directory (and thus one of them is hidden) I am not sure what to recommend.

Thanks All.

It looks like I got hit by the same issue that got WinterSnowfall.

I'm 90% sure the files were there post update because I quickly checked.

So it must have been mapping the NFS that did it.

I tried google search but didn't get a hit.

While there is most likely a way to rescue the data from the SAN discs, I don't have the time so I'm copying the files back. It take about 3 days to copy ;-(


As for the Set up
We have a lot of films and series. Easily over 1000 discs. They used to take up a wall 2m x 2.5m stacked double deep. A combination of the time finding the disc and then waiting to get past the unskipable bits, it made sense to rip the lot.

Disclaimer: Format shifting is illegal in the UK. If you've ever ripped a CD onto an MP3 player, or copied to Tape or like us ripped a movie then you've broken UK law. There was a brief one year period when it was legalized but our version of the RIAA got it overturned.

We have a 8TB server 4 x 3TB discs in raid 5.
That server also has 2 X 2TB Mirrored for All our photos, scans of important documents and my Wife's digital crafts. However since the last server had two discs die in rapidly, so I wasn't going to use that alone.

So we've also got a SAN with 3 x 3TB discs in raid 0 (didn't have the cash for 4th disc, really should use this event to add another), it also has an 1 TB external drive to act as a mirror for the 2 x 2TB mirror.


The SAN, due to its faster NIC is used at the live box. Nightly it backs up to the Server. The important stuff on the 2x2TB drives is also copied monthly onto my main PC too.