Today one of my discs had a head crash and was totally inoperable, so I took it out. It was an ancient 300GB IDE and I don't know how full it was at the time. My duplication settings don't cover much stuff, just photos that I can't get hold of again, so I assume I have lost some data during this episode. I knew this would happen if a disc failed and I'm fine with that since most of the stuff I can get hold of again.
My question is: how can I find out what I lost? At a cursory glance over my shared folders nothing stands out. I did read this thread: http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whssoftware/thread/58a871d2-2852-492a-8b0f-2f8d30f73d9b - however the add-in recommended within does not seem to have anything to do with being able to tell me what files I lost, though I did install it and had a poke around.
So:
1. Is there some way I can get a report of what was lost in the failure? I assume the OS keeps track of what's kept where, so as long as the OS disc didn't fail this information should be available?
If you haven't removed the failed drive from the Console, you should get a whole bunch of File Conflict errors (one for each file missing). You could use that as a guide. Or you could use the
WHS Cleanup Tool. It's unsupported, but it creates a list of broken tombstones that you can use to identify your missing files.
2. If not, how will lost data appear? Will it just not be there? Will it appear to be there until I try and access it, whereupon it will show up as inaccessible?
Thanks.
If the drive has not been removed from the Console, you should get File Conflict error messages and if you try to open one of those, you will get an error message (because the tombstone is pointing to file that no longer exists). If the drive has been removed from the Console, the broken tombstones should no longer be there.
