Miscellaneous notes

Notes and thoughts on various aspects of computer storage, mostly centered on data recovery.

• Year 2024
  • 16 Jun 2024 - Copy-on-write, wandering trees, and the impact on data recovery
• Year 2023
  • 11 Jan 2023 - Unraid
  • 03 Feb 2023 - Disk imager benchmarks
  • 14 Mar 2023 - Encryption keys in storage encryption
  • 19 April 2023 - Simplified theory of copy-on-write filesystems
  • 26 April 2023 - Preventing data changes during the recovery
• Year 2022
  • 22 Jun 2022 - ZFS and power failures revisited
  • 20 Feb 2022 - FreeNAS, TrueNAS, GELI, and native ZFS encryption
  • 05 Sep 2022 - A rant about NAS OSes, September 2022
  • 02 Nov 2022 - Designing a recoverable filesystem
  • 25 Nov 2022 - ZFS and ECC RAM rant
• Year 2021
  • 26 Apr 2021 - ZFS and power failures
  • 21 May 2021 - What is the best storage layout for a Chia mining rig?
  • 19 Jun 2021 - ZFS, hard drives, partitions, and fault tolerance. Also, fault domains.
  • 3 Sep 2021 - Carving AVI files.
  • 3 Oct 2021 - Narrow vs. wide and tall vs. short disk arrays.
• Year 2020
  • 07 Sep 2020 - RAID 10 (1+0) vs RAID 01 (0+1)
  • 13 Nov 2020 - Undeleting ZFS datasets
• Year 2019
  • 3 Jan 2019 - Sad thing about ZFS and FreeNAS.
  • 5 Jan 2019 - File undelete on ZFS
  • 15 Jan 2019 - Quick test for unrecoverable memory cards
  • 20 Jan 2019 - Working without a clone - is it safe?
  • 7 Feb 2019 - Filesystem structure and data recovery
  • 10 Feb 2019 - The curious case of missing ftyp
  • 15 Feb 2019 - How to create good sample files
  • 18 Feb 2019 - Progress bars in data recovery
  • 21 Feb 2019 - What can be recovered from half of a ZFS stripe set?
  • 25 Feb 2019 - How much can be recovered from a single-disk ZFS pool?
  • 29 May 2019 - Contiguous, Fragmented, and Damaged files in Klennet Carver.
  • 14 Jun 2019 - Recovering files to a share on the network
  • 15 Jun 2019 - Recovering partially damaged files from ZFS
  • 04 Jul 2019 - ZFS RAIDZ vs. traditional RAID
  • 04 Aug 2019 - RAID10 quirks in ZFS
  • 08 Aug 2019 - There is no fsck for ZFS. Why?
  • 01 Sep 2019 - Use dissimilar primary and backup systems
  • 05 Sep 2019 - Disks, Partitions, Pools, Volumes, Datasets, and Filesystems
  • 26 Dec 2019 - Recovering large ZFS pools
• Year 2018
  • 3 Jan 2018 - Klennet Carver vs. partially overwritten files
  • 24 Jan 2018 - Comment on Runtime's (GetDataBack) 'Fragmented files are not recoverable'
  • 2 Feb 2018 - Compact Disc rot
  • 4 Feb 2018 - Parallel Unique Path (PUP) carving algorithm with its quirks
  • 3 Mar 2018 - Data recovery costs and freebies
  • 7 Mar 2018 - Amount of fragmentation in real-life recoveries
  • 6 Apr 2018 - Bifragment gap carving in Klennet Carver
  • 14 Apr 2018 - USB enclosures silently change drive sector size
  • 16 Apr 2018 - Write blockers are not effective with SSDs
  • 5 Jun 2018 - Reviews, testing, and challenges in data recovery
  • 1 Oct 2018 - Determining RAID block size and starting sector, simple example
  • 2 Oct 2018 - Determining RAID0 block layout and disk order
  • 13 Nov 2018 - Determining disk order in a simple RAID5 case
  • 20 Dec 2018 - There is no JBOD in ZFS (most of the time)
  • 30 Dec 2018 - Recovery of destroyed or corrupt ZFS pools
• Year 2017
  • 3 Apr 2017 - Power saving settings and data recovery
  • 24 Apr 2017 - Disk image files vs. physical disk clones
  • 7 Jul 2017 - Notes on carving fragmented files
  • 27 Aug 2017 - On the complexity of file carving
  • 28 Sep 2017 - USB bus and bad blocks
  • 29 Sep 2017 - Difference between fixing JPEG files and full-scale carving
  • 6 Oct 2017 - Zero-sized devices
  • 11 Oct 2017 - Filesystem awareness in Klennet Carver
  • 14 Oct 2017 - Mounting a hard drive sideways - is it allowed?
  • 9 Nov 2017 - Fragmentation in video files vs. that in image files
  • 10 Nov 2017 - Dash camera is not quite a black box