It’s never goes easily does it ?!
Somehow, I had managed to almost fill my 1TB drives in my x2 bay QNAP NAS. Owing to my being paranoid about my data, I choose to mirror a pair of x1TB drives for 1TB total storage, rather the create a 2TB spanned volume using both of them.
I was down to a couple of hundred MB of free space, time to take action. I ordered a couple of shiny new Seagate 2TB drives online with the intention of going from a pair of mirrored 1TB drive to a pair of mirrored 2TB drives.
My plan was to removed one drive from the mirror set, and one of the new 2TB drives, wait for it to rebuild, and then replace the second drive and allow a subsequent rebuild to take place. Did not go according to plan :o(
I removed one of the 1TB disks, and then to ensure the 2TB disk would stand a greater chance of working, I upgraded the firmware (dumb dumb dumb !). I then installed one of the new 2TB disks.
The NAS did indeed rebuild/re-mirror with the new drive, but it created a 1TB volume on the 2TB disk. Not entirely unexpected, but not quite what I wanted :o(
Now I needed to get all the data off of the existing NAS 1TB disk onto something else, install both the new 2TB disks, create an empty 2TB volume, mirror it, and re-copy the data back onto the new larger volume. I attempted to connect one of the original 1TB disks to a Windows desktop machine with a SATA converter cabe/kit, and to mount the file system to copy the data off. And here’s where I hit real problems.
I could see the top level folder structure on the disk, but nothing below it ! :o( The QNAP version of EXT4 is a custom patched version that it seems can only be read by their chassis running their firmware. Fair enough, intellectual property and all that, but this was making my life a mite difficult now.
I tried putting the original drive back into the chassis and booting it to copy the files off over the network, but the new firmware update seemed not to like this, it booted ok, but the actual file server part did not kick in, I couldn’t see the device on the LAN to map a drive to.
In the end I had to ssh to the NAS device itself and use the Samba services to run a CIFS mount to my Windows desktop. I then spent several glorious days moving the files off folder by folder till I had them all. Then I put both new 2TB disks in, did a factory reset (including down grading the firmware as it seemed a little….buggy).
Once the device booted up and presented itself as a shiny new empty 2TB NAS, I began the unenviable task of copying all my crap back over…….several more lost days. Moral of the story for me would be:
a) don’t upgrade drivers/firmware for the sake of it
b) when dealing with a *lot* of data, *copy* and then delete, do not use move. even if a 20 stone psycho has a knife pressed to your throat
Ironically as I write this, my 2TB is being eaten into at a rate of knots. Am probably gonna have to buy a bigger NAS. Have my eye on one of these full to the brim with 3TB disks.
possibly all the storage I could need.......?
