I'm confused - you used FreeNAS on a single disk? I wasn't even aware that was possible.
Thankfully you were able to recover! I think almost everyone has learned to make backups the hard way at some point. I am the local IT guy among a lot of friends (and by extension, their friends) and so I was always the go-to when things got bad. At some point 15+ years ago, I bought "Restorer2k" which was able to save a lot of data from not-quite-dead drives, some of had to go into the freezer overnight in ziplock bags to try and unlock a frozen read-head (rarely helped), others I was able to replace the controller via eBay. One friend lost an almost finished PhD dissertation (months of work). I remember the tears when I was able to recover that :)
At some point I got tired of data recovery and started telling people to buy a Mac + cheap external drive and use the Time Machine feature. Interestingly, I haven't gotten many phone calls the last few years ;)
Err yeah. There were more disks, but I wasn't that experienced, so i made Volumes/SMB shares per disk. FreeNAS itself was on a bootable USB stick. Who needs a big huge single volume eh? :) This was back in 2007 as well.
Thankfully you were able to recover! I think almost everyone has learned to make backups the hard way at some point. I am the local IT guy among a lot of friends (and by extension, their friends) and so I was always the go-to when things got bad. At some point 15+ years ago, I bought "Restorer2k" which was able to save a lot of data from not-quite-dead drives, some of had to go into the freezer overnight in ziplock bags to try and unlock a frozen read-head (rarely helped), others I was able to replace the controller via eBay. One friend lost an almost finished PhD dissertation (months of work). I remember the tears when I was able to recover that :)
At some point I got tired of data recovery and started telling people to buy a Mac + cheap external drive and use the Time Machine feature. Interestingly, I haven't gotten many phone calls the last few years ;)