For a variety of reasons I decided to do a factory reset on my 314 after 18 months of use . . . and then restored all the files (2.1 TB of photos, files, music, videos, software).
With one glitch (see below) it all worked quite well!
For what it is worth here is the process I used and the time it took:
1) Verify that all the backups of the shares are current and readable. I use a 3TB WD USB 3 external drive and a 2TB WD Black in an eSATA enclosure attached to the 314. (My critical files are also backed up to the cloud: either Amazon Glacier or Carbonite).
2) Do a configuration backup (from the System/Settings page of the web interface). Backup everything. It will be a zip file that you download and save someplace other than on the NAS itself. Note that the configuration backup stores groups, accounts, shares, access, backup jobs, etc. Finally I ejected the external drives and disconnected them.
3) Perform a factory default (from the System/Settings page of the web interface). After confirmation the ReadyNAS went about its business: the rebuild and resync on the 4x2TB drives took about 6 hours.
4) Log into the NAS using its IP address with a browser (remember that the password has been reset). Rename the NAS, change the password, and restore the configuration from the backup (from the System/Settings page of the web interface). After this the NAS looked like it did before the reset but without any files. (Note that a factory default will create a couple of default shares which I deleted 'cause I use other names.)
5) Reconnect the two external drives in the same ports as before and restore the files. The trick here is to use the backup function of OS6.x.x. The "source" is the external drive with the backups of each share on the NAS and the "destination" is the share on the NAS. Elegant and simple, works like a charm. In all I restored 2.1 TB of data in 8.5 hours or just less than 250GB per hour.
NAS is happy, and running! And the whole process is not that scary!
Ah, the glitch . . . or maybe a gotcha (and the subject of a longer post in the forum on backups). The OS6 backup will do full and incremental backups just fine. What it does NOT do is remove files or directories in the backup that have been removed from the share. This can lead to lots of extraneous garbage being restored . . . and a whole bunch of angst about where the extra stuff came from until I figured out what was happening!
Note that the current solution to this is to totally erase the backup each time a full backup is done (once a week in my case) and this is risky and not acceptable.
rsync has an option to delete files/folders on the destination that are no longer on the source. You can use rsync for USB backups using 127.0.0.1 as the IP address.
