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Windows showing CloudDrive disks as raw.


pedges

Question

I have two drives set up to work with CloudDrive and Google Drive that store some media.

I'm not sure what happened, but when I checked them this morning (they were fine last night), Windows told me I need to format them before I can use them (in disk management they show as raw disks). I'm not sure if Windows updated overnight and something crashed, but I'm now afraid that if I format them, I'll lose all the data I have on them and have to redownload all of it from Google Drive (it's a couple TB worth of data).

Is there any way to format these without losing the data?

Up until this morning, this setup has been working flawlessly for me for months, so I'm disappointed that this is happening to me now.

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Chris has suggested this in the past:


1. Take the drive offline in disk management
2. Turn off all pinning in the CloudDrive UI
3. Clear the local cache, and wait until it's down to 0 bytes (literally empty)
4. Bring the cloud drive back online from disk management

You may need to repeat step #3 a couple of times to get this to work.

Specifically, this clears out the cache and forces the software to redownload the data from the cloud, including the file system data. 

Setting the drive as offline ensures that drive data is not updated, and that any open files are forcibly closed (eg, without saving). 

If that doesn't help, then CHKDSK or data recovery may be needed.

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Nobody in the community is 100% positive why this is happening (including Alex and Christopher). Christopher has said that the only way this *should* be able to happen is if the chunks were modified in the cloud. Google had a pretty significant service outage on March 13th, and we started seeing reports of these corruption issues on the forum immediately after that. My best personal theory is that whatever Google's issue was, they did a rollback, and restored older versions of some of the chunks in the cloud. This would obviously corrupt a CloudDrive drive. 

The above post covers the only known process with a chance of recovery, but outcomes have not, unfortunately, been great. I too, did not notice any corruption at first, but, after noticing that files began disappearing over time, also ultimately simply wiped a 250TB CloudDrive and started over. The above process did not work for me, and, in fact, caused volumes to show up RAW--but, to be clear, they were losing files before that, and were obviously corrupt. This process did not *cause* the corruption. 

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8 hours ago, jonesc said:

Chris has suggested this in the past:


1. Take the drive offline in disk management
2. Turn off all pinning in the CloudDrive UI
3. Clear the local cache, and wait until it's down to 0 bytes (literally empty)
4. Bring the cloud drive back online from disk management

You may need to repeat step #3 a couple of times to get this to work.

Specifically, this clears out the cache and forces the software to redownload the data from the cloud, including the file system data. 

Setting the drive as offline ensures that drive data is not updated, and that any open files are forcibly closed (eg, without saving). 

If that doesn't help, then CHKDSK or data recovery may be needed.

Okay. I've tried Chris's suggestion and that didn't work. I also ran chkdsk and am receiving the error "Insufficient disk space to insert the index entry."

This comes up after a few lines of saying "Inserting an index entry into index $0 of file 19."

I should note that the drive I'm trying this on is a 10TB drive and has ~5TB of free space (less than half full).

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6 minutes ago, pedges said:

Okay. I've tried Chris's suggestion and that didn't work. I also ran chkdsk and am receiving the error "Insufficient disk space to insert the index entry."

This comes up after a few lines of saying "Inserting an index entry into index $0 of file 19."

I should note that the drive I'm trying this on is a 10TB drive and has ~5TB of free space (less than half full).

I'm afraid I don't have good news for you...

I did all of the research I could, and, as far as I could tell, that just means the drive is borked. That error would usually indicate a failing hard drive, but that's obviously not the case here. It's just unrecoverable corruption. 

The data on the drive is probably recoverable with recuva. I could recover mine that way, at least. Ultimately, though, I didn't have anything irreplaceable on my drive, so I just opted to wipe it and start over rather than go through and rename everything. Any files recovered will have arbitrary names. That data on the drive should be fine, though, even though the file system is trashed--if you have anything important. 

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51 minutes ago, srcrist said:

I'm afraid I don't have good news for you...

I did all of the research I could, and, as far as I could tell, that just means the drive is borked. That error would usually indicate a failing hard drive, but that's obviously not the case here. It's just unrecoverable corruption. 

The data on the drive is probably recoverable with recuva. I could recover mine that way, at least. Ultimately, though, I didn't have anything irreplaceable on my drive, so I just opted to wipe it and start over rather than go through and rename everything. Any files recovered will have arbitrary names. That data on the drive should be fine, though, even though the file system is trashed--if you have anything important. 

Do I format it first, and then move forward with Recuva, or use Recuva while it is still formatted as raw?

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8 minutes ago, pedges said:

Do I format it first, and then move forward with Recuva, or use Recuva while it is still formatted as raw?

You can just go ahead and use recuva. It's going to scan the drive sector by sector, so it doesn't matter if the file system is screwed. 

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Just now, srcrist said:

You can just go ahead and use recuva. It's going to scan the drive sector by sector, so it doesn't matter if the file system is screwed. 

Interesting. When I tried to select the drive using Recuva, it told me I needed to format it. After formatting it, Recuva crashes when I try to run it.

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