Stupidly destroyed a ZFS pool by recreating with the same name

[Paul Kraus]

> On Jan 7, 2017, at 7:12 AM, Christoph Pomaska <cp_public at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> I not-so-recently set up a ZFS data pool on my Arch Linux setup, either for experimenting and also because I think that the concept is a pretty cool thing.
> Well, as you can read in the subject title, I recently accidentally recreated the ZFS pool that died, because I switched some drives out, instead of importing it (as not stupidly enough, I did it with the option -f, that's why it didn't ask me anything though).

What were all of the steps you went through ? Be as exact as possible.

What was the configuration of the pool (mirror, raidz2, how many top level vdevs) ?

> So, is there ANY way to get the original pool or at least ANYTHING back?

If there was data redundancy AND you did not overwrite ALL the copies of the data, then you should still be able to import the remaining good parts of the pool, perhaps on a completely different system to keep it from getting confused.

And note that when you import you can change the name of the pool at that time to avoid name space conflicts.

Also note that you should never use -f (or kill -9) as the FIRST attempt at anything.

Please be patient as I am about to leave town for a week, so I amy not respond back for a while. If the data was critical, put all the drives involved that were not overwritten in a safe place until you have a good idea how to get the data back.