I have a externally powered SATA backplane with 4 drive bays that attaches 3 hard disks, and 1 SSD (used as a cache) to my Ubuntu Linux computer via USB. The operating system sees each device as an external USB device. I have created a RAID-Z pool with all of the devices attached to this backplane.
This morning I was running a “scrub” when a rolling blackout occurred. When I rebooted, I got this message:
root@ubuntusys:/# zpool import
pool: aquifer
id: 5891443854XXXXXXXXX
state: FAULTED
status: The pool metadata is corrupted.
action: The pool cannot be imported due to damaged devices or data.
The pool may be active on another system, but can be imported using
the '-f' flag.
see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-72
config:
aquifer FAULTED corrupted data
raidz1-0 ONLINE
sdb ONLINE
sdc ONLINE
sdd ONLINE
I have already tried zpool import -f -Fn, and it immediately comes back with the same error message.
According to ZFS-8000-72, this is a totally fatal error with no way to recover without some other backup (I have no other backup).
It is pretty incredible to me that a single power failure can completely nuke a previously healthy RAID-Z system. I have to be missing something here.
Is there really nothing I can do?