RN104 crashed and stuck at "booting" or "Updating"[FW 6.2.2]

I wanted to follow up my situation with my ReadyNAS 104, and to make sure I say the biggest "thanks" to these forums - especially mdgm.

1) The issue
I had issues with my 3x3TB 104 booting after a hang.
Turns out that "something" had filled up my root filesystem - probably an app I had installed, and had tried to uninstall.... but regardless.. something went awry...

It wan't "necessarily" ANYTHING to do with 6.2.2 itself.

My "luddite" view is that this eventually caused the 104 to hang (no surprise here), and the subsequent hard power-off.
Regardless of how accurate this is, I moved through many steps (being helped by mdgm along the way) and I eventually discovered that my 3x 3TB had become degraded.
I had backups for "most of my data" - sick feeling now - and while I was resigned to rebuilding the 104 and restoring, I to keep investigating.

mdgm logged in to the unit and did a stack of investigation work, including rebuilding the OS (that resided within my RAID)..
But nothing he tried worked. The RAID seemed too busted.

So, we pulled the 3x original disks, inserted a "new" drive in slot 4, and did a factory restore to the single disk.
This rebuilt the OS to 6.2.2. At least now I know there's nothing wrong with the 104 itself.

Powered down. Inserted the 3x 3TB disks (RAID5). While I could "see" the 3x 3TB disks, I was getting an error about volumes on the 3 disk raid.

Here's where I made the decision that I needed to blow away the RAID 5. I resigned myself to a rebuild and restore.

The conundrum was that with all 4x disks in, the unit wouldn't boot.
So, having nothing to lose, I shut down, and removed the 3x RAID drives.
Not sure why, but what I did next was to randomly start the unit from the 4th disk, with only 2x of the 3 RAID disks in.
As luck would have it, the 104 saw the RAID5 as "degraded" when only disk 2 and 3 were in.

* here's where I did something I wouldn't recommend unless you're prepared to zap a disk, or worse, your NAS.... * I'm sure this would NOT be in any way sanctioned by Netgear.
I pushed the 3rd RAID disk (slot 1) in "hot" while the unit was booted off disk 4.

To my surprise, the 104 started resyncing the RAID ... as if I had "replaced" disk 1 ... wow.
Now, it took AGES (over 3 days) to finish rebuilding. (this is not unexpected, as this is only an entry level NAS)
But it finished.

But why didn't it rebuild in the first place. May never know. But to the 104's credit, it saved my data.
Now, I did what mdgm recommended.
I backed up my data to other non NAS drives, blew the entire 104 config away, and recreated the RAID5 from scratch...

Lessons?
* I was lucky, because of great help from this forum, and because the 104 v6.2.2 managed to rebuild my RAID.
* RAID is not a backup. When I came to the conclusion I needed to blow away my data... I felt a little annoyed that I didn't have a full backup. "User error" plain and simple.
* get a backup strategy in place. Don't skimp unless you're happy to lose data.

I have ended up using my 104 as the backup device now, using carbon copy cloner (Mac) to create regular incremental backups, with direct attached disk to my main computer holding the primary data. I am going to limit my use of apps on the ReadyNAS, but I'm ok with that. maybe it's not the best idea to pretend an entry level NAS should be able to do everything...

I'm happy I managed to learn lessons without losing data. Technology isn't perfect, but thanks to mdgm and a bit of luck, I'm a happy camper.
I'd be ready to get another ReadyNAS purely because of the support I see in this forum.
Hope this is a useful summary for someone!

- jd