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Forum Discussion
Readynas Support Vendor
Who is recommended to offer on-going online support for a readynas. Unsure what the Netgear options are...they seem confusing and past history is Netgear seems slow to respond. Is it the same with pai...
I think how fast they reply depends on how loaded they are at the time. If it is a fairly routine situation, the forum may be the best avenue. If it is complex, or something the forum can't help on, then tech support is obviously the way to go. You can then decide to wait on e-mail support or pay for telephone support if it is beyond the original 90 day window. (Free technical support for the first 90 days after purchase of the product).
From my observation most of the problems can be easily solved if there is a current and complete backup of the data.
A case in point - I came home last week after dinner at a friends, and sat down to watch a little TV and browse the internet. All was well until I tried to access a file on my primary NVX. I got an error message. I tried another file and got the same error message. Something is not right. I got up and walked into the front bedroom that serves as my computer room, and the NVX had all four drive lights on and the activity light was steady green, not blinking as it normally does with traffic. The front panel said my volume was on life support. I open RAIDar on the computer in that room, and got something I had never seen before. Drives one and two (3TB) had a solid green dot, but drives three and four (1TB) had a green circle with a red cross in the middle. I opened Fronview and drives three and four where shown as off line spares! This can sometimes happen when their is a power outage, but my primary and secondary units are on a UPS, and none of my clocks needed resetting.
If this had happened in the old days, I would have been in panicsville. However, I was still concerned as I had updated several files during the day and they were not backed up as that was set to start in several hours (midnight). But, I could redo those few changes. With a full and almost current backup on my secondary NVX (using rsync), I simply tried the first step and that was a reboot. Thinking worst case, I would have to do a factory default as that cures most ills. But it wipes the drives of all data, but I had one backup of everything, and it was almost current, and I had a second backup of the critical data on my trusty old NV+.
On reboot, it reported drive 3 on line and part of the volume, but drive 4 was dead. Stone cold dead. I manually updated my backups, and then replaced the drive. The next morning after a 5 hour resync, all was well and the volume was intact. (The purpose of the manual update of my backup was that the resync after replacing a drive places a heavy load on the drives and if one is going to fail, that is most likely when it will happen, and I was not sure of drive three at this point.)
Unfortunately too many of our members do not maintain a full and current backup for many reasons. That takes away the factory default or the ability in a situation like mine to simply go ahead and reboot, because their data is at risk. That is why many of us beat the backup drum as I do in my siggy. My NVX suffered a major disk failure that for some reason also took drive 3 off line.
Too many view the Raid aspect of the ReadyNAS as a backup. It is not, it is only a convenience. (I did not have to copy over my data from the backup because the system worked as designed and re-established the redundancy with the addition of a fresh drive.)
From my observation most of the problems can be easily solved if there is a current and complete backup of the data.
A case in point - I came home last week after dinner at a friends, and sat down to watch a little TV and browse the internet. All was well until I tried to access a file on my primary NVX. I got an error message. I tried another file and got the same error message. Something is not right. I got up and walked into the front bedroom that serves as my computer room, and the NVX had all four drive lights on and the activity light was steady green, not blinking as it normally does with traffic. The front panel said my volume was on life support. I open RAIDar on the computer in that room, and got something I had never seen before. Drives one and two (3TB) had a solid green dot, but drives three and four (1TB) had a green circle with a red cross in the middle. I opened Fronview and drives three and four where shown as off line spares! This can sometimes happen when their is a power outage, but my primary and secondary units are on a UPS, and none of my clocks needed resetting.
If this had happened in the old days, I would have been in panicsville. However, I was still concerned as I had updated several files during the day and they were not backed up as that was set to start in several hours (midnight). But, I could redo those few changes. With a full and almost current backup on my secondary NVX (using rsync), I simply tried the first step and that was a reboot. Thinking worst case, I would have to do a factory default as that cures most ills. But it wipes the drives of all data, but I had one backup of everything, and it was almost current, and I had a second backup of the critical data on my trusty old NV+.
On reboot, it reported drive 3 on line and part of the volume, but drive 4 was dead. Stone cold dead. I manually updated my backups, and then replaced the drive. The next morning after a 5 hour resync, all was well and the volume was intact. (The purpose of the manual update of my backup was that the resync after replacing a drive places a heavy load on the drives and if one is going to fail, that is most likely when it will happen, and I was not sure of drive three at this point.)
Unfortunately too many of our members do not maintain a full and current backup for many reasons. That takes away the factory default or the ability in a situation like mine to simply go ahead and reboot, because their data is at risk. That is why many of us beat the backup drum as I do in my siggy. My NVX suffered a major disk failure that for some reason also took drive 3 off line.
Too many view the Raid aspect of the ReadyNAS as a backup. It is not, it is only a convenience. (I did not have to copy over my data from the backup because the system worked as designed and re-established the redundancy with the addition of a fresh drive.)
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