Recover deleted volume in V5.0.8?

Hi there,

I'm sorry no.  It's 6.0.x and above firmware that has a recovery bin.

I realize it's not a feature until 6.0.x, but I was wondering if anyone knew of a workaround.  I'm sure this has happened to someone before, so I was hoping to find options on how people have successfully recovered volumes before 6.0.x.

Yeah, wish I had better news for you.

That's certainly not the answer I was hoping for.

In any case, thank you for your time and info.

There  are always options. If you have been using snapshots or replications then it will be harder to recover if you havent offline and stopped using all your volumes, chance are reduced event more.

If you have a current diagnostic report file from before the volume was deleted, the more information that is available the better chance there might be a way.

Currently there are now third party vendors who will try to recover Equallogic Volumes and data. Support should be able to provide you the company names.

Your best option would be to contact support and escalate the issue if you have the diagnostic or if they have a copy from a recent issue.

Let them evaluate the report files before. And stop using all the volumes.

It is true that these are not typical raid volumes because it is in a single storage pool and carved up are the volumes with are virtual volumes.

If not then, yes you should start recovery of you data from your long term back up solution.

Good luck.

FYI:  Support cannot recommend any recover services by policy.  This is to be fair to all the vendors. Additionally Dell doesn't qualify these services.

Data recovery services tend to be able to recover failed drives, not volumes.  Recovering volumes would require driect access to the internals of the array.  Which has never been shared with outside vendors.  Damaging that area would cause total data loss.  

Although it may be true that Dell not not provide a specific vendor there are several vendors that do data recovery and this list is available to users.  Back to at least 2011 companies like Kroll Ontrack have continued to support data recovery methods to include even the Dell Equallogic arrays. Dell has event added data recovery services to their service offerings on several product lines.

www.dell.com/.../ArticleView

As noted before here is a list that Dell provides.

Hello,

 I'm curious if any have ever claimed to recover VOLUMES on an EQL array.   Recovering a drive is obviously vastly different, since that is getting the block data off the bad drive onto a new good drive,  from accessing the internal structures of the EQL array itself where volume information is stored.  That's completely proprietary and has different versions depending on the EQL firmware revision.

 The earlier EQL FW pre 6.x didn't have a recovery bin for recently deleted volumes.  The internal mechanisms involved are nothing like an EXT or NTFS filesystem.

 Regards,

Don

Yes it is possible, but in case if you didnt create any new volumes and didnt put data on top of the deleted one.

You just have to make couple of things (in Data recovery company where i am working in we can do that):

1) Dirrect access to each individual drive

2) Logical level raid reconstruction with specific software

3) Gain access to meta data where volumes+blocks distribution described. Find backup tables and use them

4) With reconstructed raid array, decoded metada and aplied backup version of blocks distribution you can get access to each space of each volumes . Than just mount FS and save your data somewhere else.