Patent ID: 7899795

Claim:
A method comprising: discovering a lost flexible volume container inode of an aggregate, wherein discovering comprises identifying the inode as having a flexible volume type by scanning the inode and storing the inode in an inode scan list, scanning a metadata directory for files of a flexible volume type and storing the files of the flexible volume type in the metadata directory in a discovered list and wherein discovering further comprises identifying an inconsistency between the inode scan list and the discovered list; and recovering, by a storage server, a lost flexible volume associated with the lost flexible volume container inode of the aggregate, wherein recovering the lost flexible volume comprises generating a new label file associated with the lost flexible volume container inode and populating the new label file, and wherein the new label file comprises a new name of the lost flexible volume, a new universal unique identifier and a new file system identifier, wherein the new label file is different from a previous label file, the new label file is not derived from data identical to that in the lost flexible volume, and the new label file is generated without accessing the lost flexible volume.