Recovery on a 144 TB BTRFS volume
This month, our laboratory successfully recovered data from a complex case combining a BTRFS file system and an imposing 144 TB volume to be processed.
Our customer entrusted us with a Synology NAS server consisting of 20 8TB hard disks organized in RAID6, thus forming a 144TB volume. This main server, which was not backed up, housed around a hundred VMWARE virtual machines crucial to the company’s operations.
After several hard disks crashed, our customer lost access to all his data. The Synology company, supplier of the hardware, intervened on the server without success.
Our laboratory therefore received all the equipment for data recovery. After securing all the disks, the technician analyzed the BTRFS file system and found that it was degraded and could not be repaired, resulting in the total loss of data.
“The BTRFS (B-tree file system) has been designed for Linux to add advanced features needed for enterprise storage, such as fault tolerance, data protection and management. It introduces, for example, a powerful snapshot function that enables an immediate copy of data to be created, so that data can be backed up without worrying about files being modified or deleted during the backup process.”
Thanks to proprietary tools developed by our technical department, access to the damaged data zones was restored. The technician was thus able to recover the addresses of the folders and files sought, and thus the structure of the data.
For the final stage of the recovery, the technician scanned the entire 144 TB RAID6 volume to extract the data present. He then verified the integrity of the recovered files and tested the virtual machines. This final stage of the recovery took many days, given the volume of the RAID to be scanned and the number of files to be tested.
Our customer finally recovered all his data.
23 January 2018