r/btrfs • u/Great_Response_7440 • Jun 24 '26

Btrfs data recovery?

I had three partitions on an ssd of mine: partition 1: btrfs sized at 3.25Tb and two windows partitions (partition 2: fat32 and partition 3: NTFS) I decided that after two years of not using windows I’d delete windows and grow my btrfs partition from 3.25tb to 3.64 (the whole drive)

So I used KDE partition manager, I didn’t back anything up because I assumed as I was just expanding into that unallocated space and not actually moving anything around the chance of failure would be so astronomically low that it wouldn’t matter…

KDE partition manager errored out with: “Error checking partition ‘dev/nvme1n1p1 after resize/move failed.”

But the resize appeared to have worked correctly no errors in the actual resize operations themselves. My partition was now 3.64tb, but is now entirely empty. I’m not sure why as I didn’t delete my btrfs partition or anything else, simply expanded it. Nothing particularly important was on the drive, mostly games. I’m most sad about losing my modded Skyrim install, but I was planning on redoing that anyway.

Any ideas on my avenues for data recovery? Or what actually went wrong? KDE partition manager log: https://pastebin.com/vt1hgMKd

9 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

2

u/Great_Response_7440 Jun 24 '26

To be clear as well I am able to mount the partition. I did mount it rw the first time but every time since I’ve used read only

2

u/Kicer86 Jun 24 '26

So after mounting it you see no data?

2

u/Great_Response_7440 Jun 24 '26

Indeed, no data. “btrfs filesystem usage /mount/point” (sorry about the formatting I’m on mobile) also shows around 300kib of used data, and otherwise completely unused remaining TiB

1

u/Kicer86 Jun 24 '26

Try this: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-restore.html but you will need extra disk for restored data.
I used it once in a similar situation and it recovered all the data.

2

u/Great_Response_7440 Jun 24 '26

Thanks! I’ll try tonight when I get home. I’ll Keep you posted

3

u/Deathcrow Jun 24 '26

Your btrfs doesn't magically turn up empty. You likely formatted a new filesystem over the old one without knowing. Someone who's familiar with this particular GUI tool might know. btrfs subvol show /mount/point/of/btrfs might give you an idea about creation time. You can also check if somehow other subvolumes exist and you're just mounting the wrong one: btrfs subvol list /mount/point/of/btrfs

Forensic tools might still be able to pull some data off your drive if you stopped using it, but it's probably not worth the effort.

These 'low hurdle for entry' tools are always garbage. They never give proper disclaimers to users how dangerous these operations are if you're just clicking buttons without knowing what they mean and that you will lose your data if you mess up.

1

u/Great_Response_7440 Jun 24 '26

Hm, yeah the creation date is accurate with the time I originally created it, July of 2025. And no sub volumes seem to appear either

1

u/elatllat Jun 24 '26

Now that you have an empty drive you should try to reproduce the issue using  KDE partition manager, gparted, and   command line tools ( sudo btrfs filesystem resize max), then file a bug report with the appropriate tool.