Note
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories.
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try changing directories.
Question
Thursday, August 30, 2012 8:42 AM
Today, after a new downtime of our Azure VM, we restarted it but now the data disk (d:) is empty !!!!
Why??? Where are all the files ?
Please, help us. The VM works as mail server and the disk contain tons of mail messages and e-mail accounts.
All replies (11)
Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:01 AM
Just a note: the secondary disk is now labeled "temporary storage".
:-(
Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:56 AM
The D drive of virtual machines is reserved for the temporary storage disk, which is a local disk.
As the name says, it is in fact only temporary storage and, the data it contains may be wiped at any time.
If you want to have persistent storage, you need to add a new data disk to the VM either using the portal or with powershell. That disk will persist its data in your storage account as a PageBlob.
Thursday, August 30, 2012 12:16 PM
Ok, but it worked fine (more or less) until this morning.
Now there are three disk units:
1) disk 0 - 30 Gb (c:)
2) disk 1 - 70 Gb (d:) Temporary storage
3) disk 2 - 50 Gb not inizialized - unallocated
Is the third disk my (really precious) data disk ? Can I recovery the files ?
Thursday, August 30, 2012 12:24 PM
Well, if you have precious data on there, i suggest downloading a copy of the drive to your local computer. you can use a tool like http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/ to do so.
Hopefully your data was actually on that drive and not the D drive... If it was on D, it is lost forever.
Then you can try to initialize the drive, I am not a drive expert so from there I can't help but, with a backup of the drive, you will be able to try different ways of recuperating the data.
Good luck.
Thursday, August 30, 2012 2:27 PM
Thank you! I'm just downloading the vhd file in order to get a backup and try to initialize and recover it.
best,
Michele
Monday, September 3, 2012 12:22 PM
Hi Michele,
I'm having the same problem. Did You manage to get the data back? If yes, please advise how it was done.
Thanks so much,
Yehuda
Monday, September 3, 2012 3:37 PM | 2 votes
Hi Michele and Yehuda,
I apologize for the frustrating experience, however the D: drive is temporary storage and it is not possible to recover the data on that temporary storage drive when a new one is created. While data will persist on the D: drive through reboots, when the VM is moved to a different host server because of host updates or service healing, a new D: drive VHD is created on the host and the deleted from the previous host where the VM was running.
We've tried to call out that the D: drive is temporary by setting the volume label to "temporary storage" but since the D: is the only drive with Azure VMs that is not persistent, that has caused some confusion.
Michele, unfortunately Disk 2 that you are downloading will not have the data that was on the D: drive for the reasons stated above.
The VHD for the D: drive resides locally on the host server where the VM is running and not in your storage account like the OS (C:) and data disks (E: and above) do. D: only contains the page file and since the page file has no need to persist, it is more efficient to store it on the host and not in your storage account.
Thanks,
Craig
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 9:02 AM
No Yehuda, I didn't :-(
The VHD image was completely wiped...
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 9:29 AM
Ok, Craig. Thank your for your reply.
When I bought and attached the secondary disk to my VM there was not any warning messages or advice about its label or its data persistence so I installed on it my mail server with 20 Gb of post offices and tons of e-mail accounts!
Now, thanks to Azure's instability, I've lost everything and my clients are really angry.
I was forced to buy a new server from a new ISP retrieving partial data from an older server.
Azure VMs and their storage accounts are not a reliable, supported product and Microsoft should not sell them.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 10:22 AM
very :-( for me too
Thursday, February 7, 2013 10:26 AM
Hi MAGICA
I've installed a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Virtual Server, added an extra empty disk, mounted it and created a few files. Then I rebooted, and everything was gone!
I had intention of using it for backup, but that is unlikely. I've reported it to support, but this was apparently something they needed to "look into".
I've not found anything suggesting that my disk is "temporary", certainly no warnings or notes in the dashboard/portal or in the instructions on how to mount the disk. Btw: How useful is this concept of a temporary disk? I don't need 20-100GB of temporary disk....
I must now reconsider my commitment to Azure...it's seems to me like they're not entirely ready for customers. The technical support-people seems to have rather limited knowledge about Azure, and if I talk about Ubuntu that's like totally unchartered territory.
Also I was not very satisfied with the read-performance on the main drive, I had to use the drive located on /mnt/resource..which also were a bit of a downturn for me. All in all I'm in serious doubt on how to proceed from here..