I have a problem. I created a pool consisting of single volume of 1 file 2.5Tb just to fight with file duplicates. I copied a folder with photos. Some of the photos were not backed up. Just now I see my pool folder is empty. When I checked with 'sudo zfs list' it said 'No datasets available'. I thought it was detached and to attach I started again all these commands.
sudo zpool create singlepool -f /home/john/zfsvolumes/zfs_single_volume.dat -m /home/share/zfssinglepool
sudo zfs set dedup=on singlepool
sudo zpool get dedupratio singlepool
sudo zfs set compression=lz4 singlepool
sudo chown -R writer:writer /home/share/zfssinglepool
I see now empty pool! May I get my folders back which I copied to the pool before I started create pool again?
Unfortunately, use of zpool create -f will recreate the pool from scratch even if ZFS recognizes that a pool has already been created using that storage:
-f Forces use of vdevs, even if they appear in use or specify a
conflicting replication level. Not all devices can be over-
ridden in this manner.
This is similar to reformatting a partition with other file systems, which will leave whatever data is there written in place, but still erase the references the file system needs to find the data. You may be able to pay an expert to reconstruct your data, but otherwise I'm afraid the data will be very hard to get back from your pool. As in any data recovery mission, I'd advise making a copy of the data ASAP on some external media that you can use to do the recovery from, in case further attempts at recovery accidentally corrupt the data even worse.