What did you have configured as the datanode data directory? By default it writes /tmp. On reboot /tmp is cleared.
Files in hadoop seem to be intact. I have tried restarting hadoop and > hbase, but the tables still don't magically reappear as I was hoping > for. What can I do to debug this and hopefully recover my data? > Can you list the content? ./bin/hadoop -fs lsr /hbase Or, did you create the tables in quick succession and before the catalog tables had a chance to persist -- dump the inmemory edits to the filesystem -- you restarted? HBase can lose data because there is no working flush in hdfs currently. Because of this, the commit-log mechanism is ineffective (Hopefully addressed in hdfs 0.20.0). St.Ack
