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+.. _cephfs-disaster-recovery:
+
+Disaster recovery
+=================
+
+Metadata damage and repair
+--------------------------
+
+If a file system has inconsistent or missing metadata, it is considered
+*damaged*.  You may find out about damage from a health message, or in some
+unfortunate cases from an assertion in a running MDS daemon.
+
+Metadata damage can result either from data loss in the underlying RADOS
+layer (e.g. multiple disk failures that lose all copies of a PG), or from
+software bugs.
+
+CephFS includes some tools that may be able to recover a damaged file system,
+but to use them safely requires a solid understanding of CephFS internals.
+The documentation for these potentially dangerous operations is on a
+separate page: :ref:`disaster-recovery-experts`.
+
+Data pool damage (files affected by lost data PGs)
+--------------------------------------------------
+
+If a PG is lost in a *data* pool, then the file system will continue
+to operate normally, but some parts of some files will simply
+be missing (reads will return zeros).
+
+Losing a data PG may affect many files.  Files are split into many objects,
+so identifying which files are affected by loss of particular PGs requires
+a full scan over all object IDs that may exist within the size of a file. 
+This type of scan may be useful for identifying which files require
+restoring from a backup.
+
+.. danger::
+
+    This command does not repair any metadata, so when restoring files in
+    this case you must *remove* the damaged file, and replace it in order
+    to have a fresh inode.  Do not overwrite damaged files in place.
+
+If you know that objects have been lost from PGs, use the ``pg_files``
+subcommand to scan for files that may have been damaged as a result:
+
+::
+
+    cephfs-data-scan pg_files <path> <pg id> [<pg id>...]
+
+For example, if you have lost data from PGs 1.4 and 4.5, and you would like
+to know which files under /home/bob might have been damaged:
+
+::
+
+    cephfs-data-scan pg_files /home/bob 1.4 4.5
+
+The output will be a list of paths to potentially damaged files, one
+per line.
+
+Note that this command acts as a normal CephFS client to find all the
+files in the file system and read their layouts, so the MDS must be
+up and running.
+