Drives moved to NAS 104 from another NAS 104 say volume is redundant why?
I have 2 NAS 104's and I purchased the second one just to keep as a hardware backup. The chassis seems to have died and will no longer finish booting. I've tried OS recovery but it never seems to complete.
So, I put plan B into action and moved the drives to my spare 104 but even though it recognises them it says they contain reduntant volumes and in order to use them I need to delete them. I kind of hoped it would just mount the drives and off I'd go.
What can I do to add these drives to my spare? It seems to me to be crazy that the hardware can be a single point of failure and cause all of the data to suddenly become inaccessible.
Yes, the exact wording is 'Remove inactive volumes to use the disk. Disk #3,4.
Most likely the problem is that volume is simply out of sync. That can happen if there were cached writes that were never written to the disks when the old NAS failed.
I suggest getting the full log zip (download it from the logs page). If you like, you can send me a private message (PM) with a download link to the zip file (dropbox, google drive, etc) and take a look. Best not to post the download link publicly, as there is some privacy leakage (for instance, your email address would be in the log file).
There is a way to forcibly mount the volume from the linux command line. There would be some loss of data (since some writes were lost) - it's hard to say how much. Another option is to connect all four disks to a Windows PC, and use RAID recovery software that supports BTRFS. ReclaiMe is one package that folks have used here with success.
Re: Drives moved to NAS 104 from another NAS 104 say volume is inactive why?
Stephen,
Thanks for your time and effort.
I don't think I can get a log out of the ill 104 but I can try. I can ping it during boot so maybe I can ssh onto it too. It seems to get stuck preparing the web interface. No files are accessible even though it does show the shares. They just take ages to mount and timeout. I guess I can get a log from the working one and see what if anything it thinks is a reason why it can't mount the drives. I had the system arranged as 2 volumes of mirrors so I'm hoping to recover the data as I don't believe any one of the disks has failed.
I'm just pretty nervous about any settings that could suddently come up and say 'all is fixed, here's your drives nice and empty'. I think I had that once before many years ago by just changing a setting so I'm treading very lightly.
In the mean time I have ordered a 3.5in USB caddy that I can as you say plug the drives into a Windows machine and use some recorvery tools. I think this is will be the safest option and knowing that I have 2 copies of each volume gives me a little reassurance that I'll get this resolved. I do have other back ups but your most recent data is only ever as safe as the last time it was backed up.
At the end of the day the 104 has been an incredibly reliable product and the drives have survived really well (2014 and 2016 WD RED 4TB each). I was in the process of copying all of the data over to new 14TB drives when it failed. Statistically that is very improbable but here I am.
I'm just pretty nervous about any settings that could suddently come up and say 'all is fixed, here's your drives nice and empty'. I think I had that once before many years ago by just changing a setting so I'm treading very lightly.
I was in the process of copying all of the data over to new 14TB drives when it failed.
Obviously it's good to be careful.
Were you restoring data to a fresh volume from a backup? Or were you expanding an existing volume when it failed?
In the mean time I have ordered a 3.5in USB caddy that I can as you say plug the drives into a Windows machine and use some recorvery tools. I think this is will be the safest option and knowing that I have 2 copies of each volume gives me a little reassurance that I'll get this resolved.
Generally it is best to connect all the drives to the PC at the same time (though you can get away with all-but-one). So one caddy might not be enough.
