I have about 8Tb of A/V on an ethernet only NAS Drobo 5N. Plex Media Server used this beautifully, and STILL DOES. I had a muck up on my Drobo with its “Shares” of Data Blocks, and if I go into the NAS, using Unix and with invisible files turned on, the actual Media files cannot be seen. They are there. Plex plays them. the Plex Media surver on my Mac Sierra says that it is unable to download any media file because they can’t be found. This means to me that there is an orphan root file tree on the NAS which incredibly Plex is able to access and present to me as a movie, but unable to LOCATE (Unavailable) if I want to download it. I thought of two possible solutions. You hopefully may have a Plex guts based way to get at the files!
(1) Physically Remove each disk from the NAS one at a time, and scour them with Data Rescue 4, and recover any A/V files it finds (hopefully it can)
(2) Somehow re-surrect that orphaned invisible file structure which is hidden and which Plex clearly has access to, but I can’t see.
I’m not sure I agree with you. I am aware they use Linux. One can mount the drive as read only, and if Data Rescue finds intact A/V files with a scan, they will be there. If the proprietary formatting (some type of RAID) they use means parts of the bulk of files are across two disks, then I agree with you. Plex is not able to find the files because the DIRECTORIES that existed do not exist in /Volumes/Something on the Mac which is where the plex library is listed as residing (and it did reside there). There are perhaps orphaned inodes. I can ssh into the Box and look around, but I believe I will see nothing different (i.e. those directories were probably beheaded at the root when I deleted a drobo share after I thought I had copied it with carbon copy cloner (which failed me), but the files are there because they have not been overwritten). The fact that Plex is able to play each and every movie, does give me some hope! I have VMWARE on my Mac, so I will examine the SCP program but I am not sure why I can’t use an equivalent tool on my mac that simply uses scp? I did also post my question on Drobo. I’m a Unix person so I am not afraid to look for things on the Drobo; I’m not about to change anything; that much I know. I’m looking to find what I believe are plenty of files and copy them elsewhere. Thanks for your help. I did ask Drobo about efsck but I don’t think I have the guts to run that unless I find other Drobo users have used it and their Disk structure has been helped by it.
Just a side note, BeyondRAID (the technology used by drobo in their NAS boxes) may not actually work with Data Rescue, owing to its use of proprietary format.
I’d be very careful about attempting a recovery using Data Rescue.
I logged into the Drobo with ssh, and went to the place where Plex thinks those files are, and there are no directories extant. I’m not using the finder. I’m logged in as Admin on the Drobo. I’m not sure how an scp program on windows which is using ssh anyway could find something that I can’t see with an ls -alR / … if it’s permissions I’d see the directories but not be able to get into them. They would not be invisible. Remember, I had deleted a Share (Volume) on the Drobo because I carbon copied it with success and all the subdirectories were there and it took a long time. I didn’t think to actually drill down to find individual media files inside their parent folder. So in my opinion, the deletion of the Share, simply deleted the directory tree associated with that Share but didn’t actually do an erase of the data (which may have been overwritten if I’d created new shares or added to old ones). What amazes me is that Plex has the media as if it has the location of the inode for the actual media file and plays it perfectly. I suspect even doing an fsck would not help because there is no CORRUPTION in the folder hierarchy. It’s hardly going to create ex-nihilo is it? How the heck does Plex seem to have it “as if it’s cached” but it can’t follow the path to the file because the path doesn’t exist!!
Have you thought of asking this question in the special subforum for Drobo boxes?
If there are any specialists around, you’ll find them there most likely. http://forums.plex.tv/categories/drobo
