Corrupted files

[Sean Caron]

Hi Leslie,

If you have a full backup, I would STRONGLY recommend just wiping your old
filesystem and restoring your backups on top of a totally fresh XFS, rather
than repairing the original filesystem and then filling in the blanks with
backups using a file-diff tool like rsync.

You will probably hear various opinions here about xfs_repair; my personal
opinion is that xfs_repair is a program made available for the unwary to
further scramble their data and make a hash of the filesystem... In my
first-hand experience managing ~7 PB of XFS storage and growing, I have
NEVER found xfs_repair (yes, even the "newest version") to ever do anything
positive. It's basically a data scrambler.

At this point, you will never achieve anything near what I'd consider a
production-grade, trustworthy data repository. Any further runs of
xfs_repair will either do nothing, or make the situation worse. Fortunately
you followed best practice and kept backups so you don't really need
xfs_repair anyway, right?

Best,

Sean

P.S. No backups? Still don't even think about running xfs_repair.
ESPECIALLY don't think about running xfs_repair. Try mounting ro; if that
doesn't work, mount ro with noreplaylog and scavenge what you can. Write
off the rest. That's the cost of doing business without backups. Running
xfs_repair (especially as a first-line step) will only make it worse, and
especially on big filesystems, the run time can extend to weeks... Don't
keep your users down any longer than you need to, running a program that
won't really help you. Just scavenge it, reformat and turn it back around.





On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 11:21 AM, Leslie Rhorer <lrhorer at mygrande.net> wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
>         I have an issue with my primary RAID array.  I have 13T of data on
> the array, and I suffered a major array failure.  I was able to rebuild the
> array, but some data was lost.  Of course I have backups, so after running
> xfs_repair, I ran an rsync job to recover the lost data.  Most of it was
> recovered, but there are several files that cannot be read, deleted, or
> overwritten.  I have tried running xfs_repair several times, but any
> attempt to access these files continuously reports "cannot stat XXXXXXXX:
> Structure needs cleaning".  I don't need to try to recover the data
> directly, as it does reside on the backup, but I need to clear the file
> structure so I can write the files back to the filesystem.  How do I
> proceed?
>
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