So…I needed to destroy and recreate the zpool which holds all my root and home datasets for all my OSes.
Since I maintain hourly replicas of those on another machine, I thought it would be pretty clean. I tested to make sure they were valid. Everything seemed OK and low risk. In the worst case, I could reinstall since all my important config is in a different zpool.
I did a test run in a VM to ensure that everything would be smooth and I knew what I was doing.
Then, when I went to create the new zpool, I used the wrong partition and overwrote one of my other zpools. You know, the zpool with all the config mentioned above that I wasn’t prepared to lose. One mistake and “poof”, all data gone.
That zpool held, my pictures, my vmware config, my firefox profile, my thunderbird profile, my steam data and all my most important VMs.
The good news is that my pictures are safe since I have a replica I update nightly and I take daily borg backups.
Most of what is left is inconvenient to recreate, but not the end of the world.
The biggest loss is my Windows VM. I know, many of you probably don’t see that as a loss but I had some data in it that I hadn’t yet copied out. Most notably, my most recent years tax documentation.
So, it is going to be a long day/week/month trying to reassemble everything.
In the end, I guess the learning is the same as always, be careful with your data and have backups.