DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

Hello everyone,

I've learned lots about extending my NAS box from reading this forum. I've got a story to share that might be helpful for the community. Last week I deleted all of my 2007 photos (moment of weakness) by accident on my RAID1 DNS323. I didn't figure this out until the next day. I immediately powered down the box and pulled one of the drives out. No new data had been written to the drive since I deleted the files so I was confident that something could be done to retrieve the 9000+ jpgs.

I popped the drive into a SATA USB enclosure and mounted the drive on my Powerbook (OSX 10.5). I installed EXTFS (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/) to allow the drive to be readable on OSX. The bonus is that EXTFS also installed a unix utility called 'debugfs'. I then just followed the howto here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Ext2fs-Undeletion.html to 'undelete' the files from the disk.

I did deviate from the HOWTO as the version of dumpfs included with EXTFS is smart enough to dump large files so you don't have to dump small pieces and do block math.

Here's my procedure:
1) use dumpfs lsdel to create a list of deleted inodes
2) sort through the list to find the files that I am interested in and cut those out to a new txt file
3) use scripts to strip out just the inode numbers and feed them into debugfs to dump the files to a new location
4) use a exif rename tool to rename my jpgs with the embedded exif information

In the end, I managed to recover all of the deleted jpg files completely.

I'm not sure if you can use dumpfs to unformat an EXT2 drive, but you may be able to dump your files.

After all of this, I just put the drive back into the DNS323 and powered it up (was a little nervous). It didn't ask to rebuild the RAID1, the box doesn't even noticed that I removed the drive and put it back. Now I'm thinking on breaking the RAID set and just having two volumes and rsync between them.

I don't have the exact scripts with me, but I can post those later if anyone is interested.

cheers,
klc