At home I run a homebrew server with Ubuntu 18.04LTS. Inside are 4 drives: an SSD with the OS, a 1.4TB SSD as a Samba share and two 8TB HDDs as a mirrored (RAID1) array with ext4. The photographs are on the Samba share on the large SSD and every night this is copied to one of two directories on the RAID. With a total of 5 copies of each photograph I thought we were safe.
Slowly, and unobserved, the PSU of the server has been failing and this has caused the introduction of file system errors. Now I can’t get past the root directory of any drive without seeing input/output errors.
I replaced the PSU and have introduced another small SSD and installed Unbuntu 24.04 from scratch and, with a good deal of trepidation, am now setting about the recovery process. I have two more HDDs to play with: one 8TB that matches the RAID components and a 2TB.
I plan to use GNU ddrescue to copy the corrupted RAID and SSD and then set about the recovery using e2fsck.
But how?
