novice ReadyNAS user: "volume expansion failed", how to address this problem?

Your NAS does have USB 3 ports on the rear (USB 2 on the front). Smallnetbuilder measured about 50 MB/sec backup speed to the USB 3.0 port (with an NTFS formatted drive).  If that's correct, your backup would take about 36 hours.

If you have gigabit ethernet, you can get somewhat faster speeds - the sequential read speed of your v2 is ~80 MB/sec.  Some sync programs (for instance teracopy) will verify, which will slow things down, but might be worth doing. 

If you can leave the PC up the full time (and have gigabit), then I'd probably copy over the network.  But either way is reasonable.

Another great answer, thanks!

I can leave the PC online for the entire time needed, and will copy via ethernet (though I didn't know my NAS had USB 3, colour me surprised. Nice one, Netgear :-) 

Do you recommend teracopy to do the copy? I'd definitely be wanting to verify, as I might have to wipe the NAS after copy (as you mentioned). I had someone recommend "synctoy", but it's very simple (can't schedule it, and it doesn't verify).

I've used both teracopy and robocopy for this.  Robocopy is definitely slower (but is very robust and is reasonable for incremental backup).

For a one-time full backup, teracopy is a good choice.  It will offer to replace the built-in windows copy - I suggest not letting it do that.  If it does it silently, there should be a preference to turn it off.

Great, thanks again. I have downloaded teracopy and it's counting files now :-)

Do you know what I need to click to set it to verify the copies? I've read their decriptive site, and read a couple of reviews, but none yet have mentioned verification.

If you click on the "more" button you should see a verify button.

oops, missed that one! This is what happens with a Mac guy of 25 years experience puts a PC on his desktop as well (old reflexes and knowledge can sometimes lead me astray :-)

Well, that took a while! What with waiting for drives to arrive and all the copying, phew.

I successfully copied all of the files off the NAS onto an 8TB drive (connected via USB to my desktops). fyi: before doing that, I deleted about 500GB from the NAS, so total copied was just under 6TB (I did this because you pointed out to me that an entirely full NAS was a bad idea).

I then pulled the 6TB drive from the NAS while it was still on, and got an alert about disk failure and disk removal.  

I inserted a new 4TB drive (a Seagate NAS specific drive) and the NAS rebuilt itself. 

All seems to be working normally, but I haven't gained any space from adding the 4TB drive, there is still only 500GB free.

I'm confused, I had thought that adding the 4TB drive into the empty 4th slot of the NAS would offer more storage space. When I had only 3 drives in, I had redundancy and certain amout of space. With the 4TB drive, is it that I just have more redundancy, but no more storage space? Seems I just wasted quite a bit of cash (I was happy with having single drive failure redundancy).

Can you offer any insight? Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer (again :-)

Is this your current drive configuration:  

1) Western Digital WDC WD30EFRX-68AX9N0 2794 GB

2) Seagate ST4000VN000-1H4168 3726 GB

3) Seagate ST4000VN000-1H4168 3726 GB

4) Seagate ST4000VN000-1H4168 3726 GB

If so, you should have an 11 TB volume (10 TiB reported by the NAS).

Since you have a full backup, you perhaps should do a full factory reset, and then restore the data from the backup.

Thanks again for the reply.

You're close on the setup, here are the bays they are in:

Looks like a reset is going to be necessary (what I thought, just wanted confirmation :-) Rats, that's a lot of data moving still to do!

Really appreciate it, I'll be back in a few days with the results.

Sorry, a quick question: is there a way to save all of the settings I've got so that, after I factory reset, I can load those settings and have all my shares/permissions/security/Services back up and running the way they were before the reset? 

I've clicked around in the web interface, and I haven't found a way to save all my settings.

Cheers!

Chas

I don't own an 5.x NAS.  There is a way to save the configuration with both 4.x and 6.x firmware, but I'm not seeing it in the 5.x user manual.

Good news and bad news!

The good: after the factory reset and a lot of time, I've got a 9.9TB volume waiting for me to use, yay! (thanks very much for all the advice :-)

The bad: I did find a way to save the configuration in the web interface (apologies for not finding it before writing my query above), but now I can't restore it :-( Here is what I see:

To back up the configuration, I checked "Everything" and saved the archive (this I did before doing the factory reset, of course).

If I use the "Browse" button to navigate to the saved archive (named "_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911"), it doesn't actually let me choose the archive itself (there is a "Choose" button in the navigation box, but it actually just opens that directory to show its contents, I can't actually choose it). If I drag the archive folder into the "Select a Backup Archive:" dialog box (which I can do in Safari, on a Mac), I then get this when I click "Restore":

The actual archive created looks like this (it got saved by default in the Download folder in my user directory):

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/default/

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/exim/

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/exports

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/frontview/

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/group

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/hostname

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/hosts

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/ietd.conf

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/minidlna.conf

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/msmtprc

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/mt-daapd.conf

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/netatalk/

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/network/

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/passwd

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/passwd-

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/proftpd.conf

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/readytivo.conf

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/resolv.conf

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/samba/

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/shadow

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/udhcpd.conf

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/etc/wizd.conf

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/tmp/

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/tmp/config_restore_info

file:///Users/gg/Downloads/_READYNAS_CONFIG-N3-20160414-140911/tmp/timezone-backup

I've tried in Safari, Firefox and Chrome on a Mac, and in Chrome on a PC running Windows 10 (I even tried to zip the archive and point to that). All with no success.

I'm at a loss, I had done a lot of configuring of my ReadyNAS, and it's really unlikely I'll be able to restore it propery step-by-step (particularly passwords and usernames for users, and several pieces of software acess the drive for automatic backups).

Any insights? 

The configuration archive should already be a zip file (though perhaps the Mac didn't store it that way).

Perhaps try downloading a config file from the windows PC.  Then maybe you can replace the files with the ones you saved from before???

That does make sense, very strange it wasn't saved as a zip file (guess I should have saved the original config from the PC). I'll have a try, thanks for the advice. One of the shares is the "Media" folder, and I never changed those permissions, so I'm in the process of cloning back about 4TB of data (it's the private accounts that will be the challenge to restore properly).

By the way, why does the title of this thread start with "Betreff"? I didn't start my initial query with that title, is it shorthand for something?

All faffing about aside, it's been an adventure, and I certainly could not have muddled through by myself. I know I've thanked you at just about every stage, so here is an overarching thank you for all the help you've offered: thank you!! I'm a photographer, so if there is anything you'd like to know about just any area of photography (I'm versatile), just ask :-)

Cheers!

Chas

Betreff means "subject" in German.  The English equivalent would be "Re: novice ReadyNAS user....."

It shows up on the second post - not sure if he entered it, or if his forum language is set to German.