Network drive on Raspberry Pi with pi-hole deleted after upgrade

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1

It seems my network SSD has been deleted or overwritten after or during a pi-hole upgrade.

Details about my system:
Pi Model B+ V1.2, 700 MHz Single Core, 512 MB RAM
SSD 500 GB in USB-3-case, formatted as FAT
network software on the pi to access it with Macs (High Sierra, Mojave)
PiVPN (still working)
Pi-hole also working after upgrade

What I have changed since installing Pi-hole:
It has been running fine for months. Only restarted it occasionally when it seemed slow. Now upgraded the software (only pi-hole) and the drive is full but no files.

Yesterday, I upgraded my pi-hole installation on a raspberry pi with the "pihole up" command.
I don't do this regularly, only when I feel I really need to due to problems or after too long a time.
There were issues yesterday, slow and breaking connection to the network drive during access, but this has happened before and is sometimes due to bad wifi connection, I guess. (Big city, lots of interferences and such.)

When today I tried to access the drive (SSD in USB-3-case) it showed "3.6 GB free" and no files whatsoever, although there was 156 GB free space yesterday.

I shut the raspi down and disconnected the drive to check on a computer. Nothing. My Mac shows the drive, but not in Finder, only in Disc Utility. The drive seems completely full, and it won't mount. When I click on "disk4s2" under the "LaCie Rugged FW USB3 Media", it says "Not Mounted" and I can't seem to mount it. It's formatted as FAT, as I did since that worked best in the network.

On a linux machine, the drive shows up as "can be mounted" but when I click on it, nothing happens.
UPDATE: I just checked, this does not say anything necessarily. I clicked on the internal SSD and it also doesn't do anything. Must be a Linux Lite quirk. Trying Gparted now...

On Windows (7) it says it wants to format to be able to use it.

-What could have happened?
-Has this happened to anyone else (due to a pi-hole upgrade)?
-Is there a chance I can get the files back?
-Are there log files I could consult to see what happened since last night? (If so, where?)

Honestly, this is the reason why I'm so hesitant to upgrade these things once they run. Usually something breaks. I'm not a programmer and it takes me hours to reinstall these things and get them running.

The only other things running on the raspi besides the pi-hole where programs for the network drive access, some firewall and PiVPN. The latter is still functional. So not everything broke.

2

You could have had a hardware issue (SSD failure).

It is extremely unlikely that Pi-hole caused this.

As you noted, you were having performance problems over time.

If the SSD has failed, it is unlikely. There are some data recovery tools for MacOS (Drive Genius, TechTool Pro, etc.) that you can try.

3

Thanks for the answer so far.
I doubt it's the SSD, it was fairly new and I've been using SSDs in other machines for give or take ten years without failing. It would mean that on the Raspberry Pi the SSD was under constant stress, although I only used it to occasionally put files on it to access them from other computers. Less use than in my Macs with an OS running on it.

Also, it's not that the drive cannot be recognized (as in a failure, I guess). But rather it seems full to the brim (I don't know with what) and apparently I can format it.

I could do that to try and see if it fails again, but first I want to make sure there is hope in getting the files back. Perhaps there's a "hickup" in the file system or so. I am currently trying Gparted on a linux machine, and it takes ages, but also I don't know if I'm using it correctly.

4

With a 500 GB SD card, I can't imagine that anything Pi-hole is logging or storing can come anywhere near filling this device.

I run a handful of Pi-holes, all on SBCs with 32 GB uSD cards. These cards typically have less than 30% space used (about 10 GB). That includes the OS and all running apps (which is typically only Pi-hole with full logging enabled).

Not necessarily. I recently had a Samsung SSD fail in an occasional use PC. Just quit on me, nothing was recoverable, the PC and drive were rarely used.

I suspect that in your case, if the drive has not failed (as appears to be the case), there is a file system corruption. There are methods to mount the drive in MacOS so you can see more than the boot directory, but I don't recall the specifics.

6

Yes, I searched around a little and apparently it's a thing, that SSDs suddenly show up as "unallocated space" with seemingly nothing on them.

This is my first in, say ten years. Samsung micro SD cards however fail regularly on me.

There seems to be a small chance to get the contents back with some nifty programs, but I'll have to try that later. That will take time.

But I'm not overwriting it yet for that reason.

It's not suuuper important (I think), but the last backup was from the beginning of the year, so lot's of work to get the rest back flying around on some machines. At least I hope I never put files on it that weren't also somewhere else.

That said, I need to get into installing an automated backup of the pi-hole drive on a second drive...

7

Also note that unless you have changed file locations, Pi-hole (which I assume is installed on the SD card and not on the attached SSD), will not write any files to the SSD.