File Corruption after power failure.

Have you considered purchasing a UPS?

It is best to minimise the numbers of unsafe shutdowns of the NAS.

If you connect a UPS do you still have the issue when your PCs shutdown unsafely when there is a power failure?

Thanks for your reply and my apologies for not replying to you sooner!

Perhaps I'm being naive, but when I write or save a file on the PC it's then safe whatever happens to the power supply to the computer. If the computer crashes and then re-starts, the file is still there and undamaged. On the NAS this doesn't appear to be so, in that a crash can have the effect of corrupting a file even if it was saved to the hard disk on the NAS some hours previously. Is this how it's meant to work? And why?

I will buy a UPS if this is the only way to protect the files, but it seems strange to me.

Files that were saved and closed shouldn't be corrupted, I would think.

What version of RAIDiator is on the ReadyNAS?

If you download your logs (Status > Logs > Download all logs) and extract the zip contents what does initrd.log look like?

Connecting a UPS would be a good step to take and would help isolate the cause of the problem.

Thank you.
I've ordered a UPS and I'm installing that today so I can have a look at the logs at the same time.

The initrd log looks lke this:
[2010/07/26 09:11:20] Factory default initiated by Frontview!
[2010/07/26 09:25:14] Updated from RAIDiator to 4.2.12.
[2010/08/15 18:25:20] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.12 to 4.2.13.
[2011/01/20 12:07:57] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.13 to 4.2.15.
[2011/04/16 08:12:59] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.15 to 4.2.16.
[2011/05/07 06:51:18] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.16 to 4.2.17.
[2011/07/27 05:01:47] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.17 to 4.2.18.
[2011/08/03 15:07:44] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.18 to 4.2.17.
[2011/09/12 14:48:48] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.17 to 4.2.19.
[2012/04/30 08:09:26] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.19 to 4.2.20.
[2012/06/23 08:24:29] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.20 to 4.2.21.
[2012/09/23 08:34:34] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.21 to 4.2.22.
[2013/06/05 12:23:42] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.22 to 4.2.23.
[2013/07/25 07:09:08] Updated from RAIDiator 4.2.23 to 4.2.24.

I believe that if there is a power cut all files saved to the NAS since the last reboot will get corrupted. The NAS is set to close down every night so in effect a days work can be lost.

I've installed a UPS so that should help but it seems wrong to me that the files should get corrupted in the first place by a power failure.

JMi wrote:
...I've installed a UPS so that should help but it seems wrong to me that the files should get corrupted in the first place by a power failure.

Any pending disk writes can be lost, which can result in a corrupted file system.

Arguably the NAS could be better at this. But a UPS is the best way to prevent it.

So I wonder why there should be any pending disk writes after you have pressed "save" on a fairly small Word or Excel file?

OK give it a few seconds but after that I would have expected it to have written to the disk and be safe.

You might wish to consider backing up your data and doing a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) then restore your data from backup.

This will give you a clean setup on 4.2.24 and may well help with this issue.