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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS 104 - Volume: Volume data health changed from Degraded to Dead
I have a replacement disk on it's way because the disk in bay 4 has shown an increasing ATA error count. However, whilst the disk is on it's way Disk 2 went offline and, after a reboot of the ReadyN...
StephenBI actually didn't come here to argue, I merely came here to reply to TickT0ck to offer my view.
However, with that said, your comments aren't accurate and appear typically arrogant for someone who didn't lose 2 decades of family photos and all their work. Let me explain.
My data used to include pictures of my children's births, birthdays, Christmases, Holidays, School Proms and also pictures of family, friends including Grandparents who sadly have now passed away. Your comments in defending the technology appear dismissive and therefore insensitive.
My point regarding the NAS is simply, it is sold as a storage device containing multiple points of redundancy which ultimately need their own spare redundant NAS to backup the Terra bytes of data. That's ok (to a point) but when a customer puts their faith in a product (and maintains it by the way because over the years I've had it multiple spindle based disks have failed and have needed replacing) it's simply ridiculous that when the multiple forms of redundancy fails the same customer is charged a small kidney to have to pay to buy a lottery ticket on whether the data can be recovered or not.
As for the data-0 volume, there only need be a data volume which, as we agree either can't be found or mounted so a data-0 volume magically appeared. At least we can agree on one thing 🙂
Put simply, you buy a product with multiple points of redundancy, which you need to buy 2 of to cover the possibility of 1 failing and when the multiple redundancy fails to need an operation to remove a kidney on a hit-n-hope possibility that you may recover some of your data.
MWilkinson wrote:
My data used to include pictures of my children's births, birthdays, Christmases, Holidays, School Proms and also pictures of family, friends including Grandparents who sadly have now passed away. Your comments in defending the technology appear dismissive and therefore insensitive.
I was not intending to be dismissive - and I understand the impact of the loss. I have consistently offered what help I can to folks who run into the inactive volume symptom. Sometimes I can help, other times I cannot. One limitation is that I don't want to offer advice that actually makes the problem worse. I point people towards data recovery services, because I think that gives them the best chance of avoiding loss.
IMO, the marketing for consumer NAS (Netgear's and others) has often misled consumers into thinking the redundancies built into RAID and file systems like BTRFS are enough to keep people's data safe. Unfortunately they are not. IT types know this, and will put the proper processes in place. But normal consumers all to often will take the marketing at face value and don't.
Saying that those redundancies aren't enough isn't defending the technology. It's just being honest. I stress the need for backup here because it's the only channel I have, and I think it has convinced some folks to put appropriate backup plans in place. The goal is to prevent others from experiencing the data loss that you unfortunately did.
FWIW, I felt your comments on backup being over the top might be understood as meaning that backup isn't needed - and that is why I responded the way I did. A backup plan is always needed to protect your data (whether you own a NAS or not).
Your NAS did not create a new volume. It is showing data and data-0 because it thinks it sees two volumes named data, which isn't allowed, so it calls one data-0. It sees two parts of the original data as two as separate, incomplete volumes because it's missing some information on how to combine them or that information is inconsistent. So trying to do anything with either can potentially do more harm than good, as both contain parts of your files. The NAS itself will do nothing with either, as they are not complete. So your fear that the NAS will overwrite your data is unfounded. The only way that can happen is you doing something you shouldn't. Unfortunately, what you should and shouldn't do to recover the data yourself isn't straightforward enough to give guidance here, as there are multiple things that can cause this kind of issue. If you had a backup, then trying would, at worst, simply delay your recovering from that backup if it failed and at best fix everything if it worked. So the best guidance we can give you is to tell you about a program that may be able to do that recovery (ReclaiMe) and recovery services.
If you want to try your hand at it on the NAS, then you should clone the drives and work with those, but that's likely going to be more expensive than recovery services. I suppose creating a sector-by-sector image of each on a very large device would also work, if you have that resource.
As for your statement "My point regarding the NAS is simply, it is sold as a storage device containing multiple points of redundancy"; actually, it's not. It's sold with one point of redundancy, the physical drives are in RAID configuration, and you can optionally not even avail yourself of that. But except with RAID-1, there isn't independent redundancy of the drives, else you'd need 2X the raw drive space. Of course, Netgear (and other NAS manufacturers) don't go to any effort to keep you from assuming there is more and that RAID is equivalent to backup, but they are careful to not claim it is. The real purposes of RAID (again, not made very clear by the NAS manufacturers) are creation of a single volume larger (or, at least, cheaper) than available single drives and availability in the event of the most common failure, the drives. Instead of having to take the system down to recover from a backup, you can simply replace a drive and keep going. The ability to incrementally expand that storage instead of completely replacing, thus lowing the cost of expansion significantly, it is actually a fairly new additional concept that some RAID systems still don't support. But with larger and larger drives being made and cost being kept reasonable, that lower cost expandability has become one of the major benefits. I have almost 100TB made from drives I bought incrementally, none of which exceed 8TB.
As with StephenB , I'm not "defending the technology", I'm explaining the facts of it's purpose, which are often (and sometimes tragically) misunderstood. That's not going to help you in this instance, but others do read the forum. And going forward, it will let you know that just moving to another company's NAS is not going to change anything.
If a NAS is already just backup -- that is, everything on it is also still on the system that created it -- then additional backup is just for ease of getting the NAS back online quickly in the event of a failure. But if it contains data that exists nowhere else, then backup is needed if you value that data.
So why have a NAS instead of just using an online backup service? For some, maybe a NAS really isn't the best solution. Recovery speed is one major plus for the NAS. Needing additional backup is a minus. But in my case, I don't even save files on my PC's anymore, I put everything on the NAS. I can access that data from the three computers, multiple Android devices (including an Android TV), and media player I have in the house. And with my VPN, I can even access it anywhere in the world. So multi-device accessibility is also another plus for the NAS.
When my only NAS was a single Infrant NV, I lost a volume in similar fashion. I had not yet switched to keeping my personal data only on the NAS, so all I lost was my music and video collection, which could be re-created (with a lot of effort). So I learned a valuable lesson in a manner that didn't cost me valuable data. I then bought a second NAS (by that time, a Netgear NV+) for backup because drives large enough to back up the whole NAS didn't exist, at least at a price point I could afford, and I didn't want to juggle a bunch of USB drives -- that's why I bought a NAS in the first place. Much more recently, I had a corrupted volume on an EDA500 due to the eSATA cable coming loose. Recovery from my backup was a bit of a PITA, but I could recover in reasonable time without Herculean effort.
Sandshark wrote:
It's sold with one point of redundancy, the physical drives are in RAID configuration, and you can optionally not even avail yourself of that.
Obviously we are generally aligned in our viewpoints on this.
As far as redundancy goes - unfortunately, Netgear has talked about "5 levels of protection" in their marketing literature for quite a while. For instance, the RN100 datasheet:
If you love something, protect it. With ReadyNAS, your photos, videos and files
are safe with 5 levels of protection. ...The 4360x datasheet doesn't emphasize this as much, but still has a paragraph that leads off with
With 5 levels of unrivaled data protection,...
Of course anyone purchasing the 4360X would know the limitations, since a 60-bay chassis is certainly not for ordinary consumers. But I think the marketing of "5 levels" has led to many home NAS owners making dangerous assumptions about data safety. So I do understand why MWilkinson (and others in his situation) would feel betrayed by Netgear when they experience loss of irreplaceable data.
FWIW, I have still found that the odds of data loss are a lot lower with my ReadyNAS than they are with PCs, and the archives on the various media (magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical storage, USB drives) that I relied on before I had a ReadyNAS.
According to the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YJ5T-E4QEI , those five levels of protection are RAID, Snapshots, Antivirus, Bitrot protection, and Offsite backup. I agree that calling them "levels" is a bit misleading, as they don't exactly "stack up" and the additional cost associated with offsite backup isn't made clear. But I guess you could say two of those are "redundancy", RAID and offsite backup. If they are using the "5 levels" claim and not explaining that one of them is offsite backup, then that's definitely misleading.
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