NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
A complete mess after RAID failure...
Okay, I'm very confused and would really appreciate some help from the community here.
This is going to be a long post I'm afraid but I thought it good to write as much detail as I can so that perhaps someone can help me figure out what's happening.
I have a pair of ReadyNas 214 units which I have had for years and they've been wonderful.
I've changed the names and folders here for security reasons :)
NAS1 sits in another building and serves as a backup, linked by ethernet.
NAS2 is here in the office and all work and project files are stored there.
Every night an incremental backup of NAS2 is sent to NAS1 with a full one monthly.
Lovely…
Recently NAS2 had a failed RAID drive (it has 2 drives). I quickly made an emergency full backup to NAS1 in a new folder just in case. The second drive then bravely failed after I'd replaced the dead one and was resyncing the RAID (bad luck!).
Attempting to add a new second drive failed in all kinds of ways. I had to then wipe the two drives, reset NAS2 to factory conditions and repopulate.
Now, in all this 'something' ended up different to my original setup. (Have you ever seen the movie "Event Horizon"? we're looking at that kind of scenario!) :)
1: FOLDERS AND SHARES
===================================
I now have a volume on NAS2 called ABC. To repopulate NAS2 I copied all my data via windows explorer from NAS1 to: \\NAS2\ABC
If I look on the SHARES area in the web interface for NAS2, I can only see the HOME FOLDERS and a WORK share - NO ABC folder.
If I look at NAS2 in windows explorer, I see everything:
-ABC
-- : (a bunch of system folders)
-- : WORK
-HOME
-WORK
There appears to be TWO WORK folders/shares visible in windows explorer but they're the same - ie, if add a telltale file to the ABC folder, I see it in both instances.
I can't see the other folders in ABC in the shares area on the NAS2 web interface! Just the WORK and HOME folders.
What happened here? Where did I go wrong when I repopulated?
2: BACKUPS (THE BIG PROBLEM)
==========================
The BIG problem is my backups.
I made a new backup job to send to a folder in the root of NAS1 called BACKUP
I set it up to run, and it appeared to do FULL backup to the new folder in the first run as expected, taking a couple of days.
It had created a folder called \\BACKUP\ABC and what looked like all the files were there.
It made a folder called \\BACKUP\ABC\WORK but that was EMPTY!
I can see a folder called \\BACKUP\WORK which has some folders with the latest date in them that I know haven't been touched in ages and that isn't fully synchronised.
I tried creating a test file in the root of WORK on NAS2 and running my backup. The test file doesn't appear anywhere on NAS1.
I used RSYNC mode, followed the instructions on the ReadyNAS website and I'm utterly perplexed!
OS 6.10.10 on both units.
5 Replies
AH! Now that makes a lot of sense! Thanks SO much for a quick response. And also SO glad the solution seems pretty simple.
Giving this a try now. So far, I'm now able to see my WORK SHARE in all the proper places, incl the web interface. Let's see how the backup fares...
AH! Now that makes a lot of sense!
You were responding to an AI-generated post. I suggest you read my reply which outlines next steps.
Some of the steps in the earlier post were missing, and since there is at least one unexplained issue I recommend doing the reset and starting over.
LOL, I kinda guessed it was either AI or a copy-paste! :)
I'm going to make sure I've got a full, manual backup of everything first before I try a reset... see you in a couple of days... ugh.
Thanks for the insight though.
I now have a volume on NAS2 called ABC. To repopulate NAS2 I copied all my data via windows explorer from NAS1 to: \\NAS2\ABC
If I look on the SHARES area in the web interface for NAS2, I can only see the HOME FOLDERS and a WORK share - NO ABC folder.You used the wrong process. Folders are not the same as shares. (Technically, shares are BTRFS subvolumes). The BTRFS volume (ABC in your case) is also not a share. You can only access it directly using NAS admin credentials. If you don't really know what you are doing, then you shouldn't be using those credentials for anything other then accessing the Web UI.
One puzzle here is where the WORK share came from. That is not created by default.
What you should now is delete all those folders in the root, and then re-create the shares via the admin web ui. The simplest apprach is do a factory reset from the web ui (system->settings->update; press "Perform Factory Default), and then start over. The NAS data volume would be called "Data" if you are using the default X-RAID (which is what I normally recommend).
There should also be a couple of shares created automatically - Documents, Music, Pictures, Home, Videos. Start by deleting the ones you don't use. (Note you CANNOT delete Home, so leave that one. If you don't use it, you can remove all file sharing protocols for it in the share settings - then it will not show up in File Explorer). FWIW, while the Home folders are useful for companies, I don't recommend them for home NAS users. Some operations are awkward, so if you don't need the access controls for the home folders, it is better to just use ordinary shares.
Then create the missing shares from the shares page in the web ui. If you use the Home folder(s), then you also need to re-create the NAS user account for each of those folders (same name as the folders). Then access the NAS with File Explorer using those account credentials using File Explorer - that is needed to properly recreate the Home folder(s) for you.
After that copy the data share-by-share from the PC (best not to use NAS admin credentials for this step). For the Home folder, you do want to use the appropriate account credential for the folder.
Once that is all in place, you can recreate any backup jobs you had running on the NAS.
I made a new backup job to send to a folder in the root of NAS1 called BACKUP
I set it up to run, and it appeared to do FULL backup to the new folder in the first run as expected, taking a couple of days.
It had created a folder called \\BACKUP\ABC and what looked like all the files were there.
It made a folder called \\BACKUP\ABC\WORK but that was EMPTY!Something odd in your description, as the path should start with \\NAS1
If the shares and users of NAS1 are similar to what you had and want again on NAS2, do a configuration backup on NAS1 and restore it on NAS2. If you've done some things already, that may not work unless you factory default again before doing the configuration restore. It's a shame you didn't think to make a configuration backup of NAS2 when you backed up all the data, as that would have made things much easier.
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
