I recently had a bizarre problem with a share on on my NAS that Tier 3 support was unable to explain to my satisfaction. Maybe one of you has a theory?
The Share in question is a collaboration space, so everyone on staff has access, both in office and remotely through ReadyCloud. At least one staff member accessed it remotely on Sunday and said everything looked normal. On Monday morning, every folder had a last modified date from early April 2014, and there were no files or folders created after that date. That is the approximate date the device was first brought online, btw, and the date I would probably have transferred in our files from our old NAS. I had plenty of backups, fortunately, and I restored from the most recent.
The earliest snapshot on the device is actually 2 weeks later than that, and the log does not show the share being reverted to a snapshot in any case. There are no traces in the logs that explain the event at all, even when Netgear looked in secure diagnostic mode.
Since all of my users have read/write access to that share (only I have admin access, of course), Netgear's suggestion was user error- that one of them overwrote the files from their PC. This is difficult to image for a number of reasons.
One, since they don't have access to the admin panel, they shouldn't have had any way to revert to a snapshot, which would have let a trace in the log in any case.
Two, they would have to have saved a copy of the complete volume from 3 years ago. Many of our office computers aren't even that old.
Three, if they had simply done a simple, accidental copy/paste the date modified wouldn't have been 3 years old, and it would have taken hours, especially if it were done over ReadyCloud. It is hard to imagine one of my users not noticing...
My user are all running Windows, either 10 or 7 Professional. My RN314 was running 6.8.0
It's odd that the files were old but the snapshots were also all there. I do have a suggestion as to another step you can take to maybe get to the bottom of it. Try enabling snapshot access and look to see if they contain the files that should have been there.
If they do, do you still have another machine that was used to do the original transfer to the NAS and could somebody have accidently triggered the backup process on that machine to overwrite the files? Yes, it might take hours, but if it were triggered over a weekend, it could have completed without anyone the wiser. The ReadyNAS log would show no sign of this if it were performed by another machine.
