Weird synology quirk

[EcuaTecPro]

Ok guys, let's see if I can explain this right.

 

I have a Synology DS414j for wel over 3 years now. In it are the following drives:

 

2x2TB samsung drives in raid1 (volume 1)

1x6TB WD Red drive (Volume 3)

1x1TB WD green drive (Volume 2)

 

From what I understand, the OS is installed on the 2x2tb drives, who have been running in a couple of nasses for around 6 years now ( yes I know I should probably replace them)

 

I've got my most vital information on these 2 disks since they're in raid1

Then all of my videofiles are on the 6TB RED drive, since my movie and series library is over 2 TB.

 

Yesterday I took the NAS to my office to backup my WD NAS in the office,  and when I got back home, I installed the Synology NAS in it's usual place, but when it turned on, it started beeping. Aparently the raid1 array failed, but I've had this happening before that in transport the drive got a little loose, since I don't have them screwed in place. So I opened the NAS up, pushed the 4 drives back in as far as I could, but when I booted it again, it said the same thing.

 

I repaired the volume by having the raid array rebuild itself with the same disk. but when I wanted to watch a movie later, I saw my video folder was empty.

Now remember, the video folder was made as a shared folder on the 6TB RED drive which is in the NAS as volume 3. When I checked the shared folder location, I saw it somehow was moved to Volume 1 ( which couldn't have been there before since the video folder is bigger than the raid array itself)

 

now the 6tb disks still indicates it has more than half of it's capacity used, when in reality, the other shared folders that are on that file, aren't any bigger than 10 GB.

 

My guess is that the RAW data is still on the 6TB drive, but since the disks which have the OS on it had a weird thing happening to them, the OS doesn't see the raw data, hence I lost over 2 TB of movies and series.

 

Please help

[Electronics Wizardy]

You got backups right? Id restore those.

 

For future, id set it up as one volume using the synology hybrid raid, and just add a drive later on.

 

If you want the data off, these are just ext4 drives. Put them in a linux system and you can copy the files off of them. 

[EcuaTecPro]

I got backups of my most important stuff, the 2TB+ movies folder was only on that NAS, now it wouldn't mean the end of the world if I lost that, but that's over 10 years of video files lost, and it would take me years to get that back since I live in Ecuador, where we have only 5Mbit internet.

 

Could I use a mac to get these files back?

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, EcuaTecPro said:

I got backups of my most important stuff, the 2TB+ movies folder was only on that NAS, now it wouldn't mean the end of the world if I lost that, but that's over 10 years of video files lost, and it would take me years to get that back since I live in Ecuador, where we have only 5Mbit internet.

 

Could I use a mac to get these files back?

you need linux to get the files, but you can boot linux from a usb drive.

[leadeater]

39 minutes ago, EcuaTecPro said:

I got backups of my most important stuff, the 2TB+ movies folder was only on that NAS, now it wouldn't mean the end of the world if I lost that, but that's over 10 years of video files lost, and it would take me years to get that back since I live in Ecuador, where we have only 5Mbit internet.

 

Could I use a mac to get these files back?

 

38 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

you need linux to get the files, but you can boot linux from a usb drive.

Mac OS should work too, it uses ext4.

[EcuaTecPro]

mac osx doesn't recognise the drive, it only shows up as a 1.6 TB drive. I'm downloading Paragon ExtFS for windows now.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, EcuaTecPro said:

mac osx doesn't recognise the drive, it only shows up as a 1.6 TB drive. I'm downloading Paragon ExtFS for windows now.

 

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

 

Mac OS should work too, it uses ext4.

well you need a third party filesystem to use it but it will work, same with windows.

 

The thing is it isn't just ext4, its also md raid, which is only supported on linux.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

well you need a third party filesystem to use it but it will work, same with windows.

 

The thing is it isn't just ext4, its also md raid, which is only supported on linux.

Shouldn't be too much of a problem in this case though since it was a single disk, Mac will ignore the RAID headers but the data will be readable.

 

7 minutes ago, EcuaTecPro said:

mac osx doesn't recognise the drive, it only shows up as a 1.6 TB drive. I'm downloading Paragon ExtFS for windows now.

1.6TB? That is a weird size for it to be detected as.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, leadeater said:

Shouldn't much of a problem in this case though since it was a single disk, Mac will ignore the RAID headers but the data will be readable.

 

1.6TB? That is a weird size for it to be detected as.

the ext4 volume is in a md(or multiple md) volumes. Mac os x doesn't know what this is and can't see a filesystem in one. 

 

Id just make a linux live disk. https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/ then it should work fine.

[EcuaTecPro]

ok, I'll try that. Please take into consideration that I just have a 5mbit connectionan and downloading a 1.3 GB distro would take the better part of a day.

[EcuaTecPro]

after installing EXTFS for windows, it does recognise the drive, and it shows up in file explorer as being a 2.37 gb drive, with the disk manager seeing all 4 partitions, but it's say100% of the space is available. I'm trying the fedora media writer now.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, EcuaTecPro said:

after installing EXTFS for windows, it does recognise the drive, and it shows up in file explorer as being a 2.37 gb drive, with the disk manager seeing all 4 partitions, but it's say100% of the space is available. I'm trying the fedora media writer now.

your probably seeing the ext4 boot partition, not the data one

 

I was looking at distros, and i can't find any with a gui thats under about 1.2 gb, so you just have to wait.

[EcuaTecPro]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

your probably seeing the ext4 boot partition, not the data one

 

I was looking at distros, and i can't find any with a gui thats under about 1.2 gb, so you just have to wait.

 

thanks, it's downloading now.

[EcuaTecPro]

Spoiler

 

With the fedora live cd, the disk also shows up as a 1.6 TB drive. I'm guessing all hope is lost.

[Pixel5]

for the future you should consider to simply run all drives in a raid instead of running separate volumes and raids.

[dalekphalm]

7 hours ago, EcuaTecPro said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

With the fedora live cd, the disk also shows up as a 1.6 TB drive. I'm guessing all hope is lost.

How old is the WD Red drive?

 

Regular WD Red drives have a 3 year warranty, and WD Red Pro drives have a 5 year warranty. If the drive is within the warranty period, start an RMA immediately.

 

You could try a partition recovery program, but odds are the data is toast.

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 hours ago, EcuaTecPro said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

With the fedora live cd, the disk also shows up as a 1.6 TB drive. I'm guessing all hope is lost.

can you show the result on df -h in fedora?

 

send the drive to a data recovery service if you want the data.

[EcuaTecPro]

The drive is 2 years old, but it isn't the drives fault. It's still working fine, it's just Synology DSM that screwed up the thing. 

 

If I count the data that is supposed to be on there, that comes down to about 1.2 TB, but DSM tells me the drive has 3.21 used, so that means it's not seeing 2 TB, which is exactly the Video folder I lost.

 

I'll try again with the fedora live cd now that I'm a little bit more calmed down. 

[EcuaTecPro]

Ok guys, I formatted the drive last time, and started downloading all of my videofiles again. Today I moved the NAS the clean it, and when I put it back together, I didn't put the 6TB drive in deep enough, so I booted the NAS; saw the disk wasn't connected and I turned it off, pushed the drive completely in, and booted again. When I did so my 6TB WD RED NAS drive was "empty" again.

 

For some reason as soon as a drive gets disconnected, the OS remaps the shared folder to another drive, which empties it. 

 

So once again, the drive shows 600 GB used, which are my video files, but the OS shows the video folder as empty. When I put the drive into windows, it shows me 100% free space. I'm sick of Synology at this moment.

 

any advise?

[dalekphalm]

3 minutes ago, EcuaTecPro said:

Ok guys, I formatted the drive last time, and started downloading all of my videofiles again. Today I moved the NAS the clean it, and when I put it back together, I didn't put the 6TB drive in deep enough, so I booted the NAS; saw the disk wasn't connected and I turned it off, pushed the drive completely in, and booted again. When I did so my 6TB WD RED NAS drive was "empty" again.

 

For some reason as soon as a drive gets disconnected, the OS remaps the shared folder to another drive, which empties it. 

 

So once again, the drive shows 600 GB used, which are my video files, but the OS shows the video folder as empty. When I put the drive into windows, it shows me 100% free space. I'm sick of Synology at this moment.

 

any advise?

Have you contacted support about this? Could be a bug in the OS, but there could also be a way to remap the drive back to the original location using the Shell/Terminal.

[EcuaTecPro]

6 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Have you contacted support about this? Could be a bug in the OS, but there could also be a way to remap the drive back to the original location using the Shell/Terminal.

I'm doing that now, thanks! 

[EcuaTecPro]

Ok guys an update. 

 

I sent Synology an email at 6 in the morning explaining my issue. Around 12 they responded and told me it was probably impossible to recover my files, but to send them a log file and enable remote access. I did that right away and after another hour, they got back to me telling me they were able to see 2 video folders. 1 that had my files in it but was invisible to DSM, another that was empty but that was visible to DSM. They copied the contents of the invisible folder to the visible folder through SSH, and told me they're going to forward this issue to Taiwan, to their development team to have a look at what happened, and see if they can prevent it in the future. 

 

Long story short, I've got my files back, and Synology is looking into preventing this in the future. This all took less than 18 hours, which is a big plus to me!

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, EcuaTecPro said:

Ok guys an update. 

 

I sent Synology an email at 6 in the morning explaining my issue. Around 12 they responded and told me it was probably impossible to recover my files, but to send them a log file and enable remote access. I did that right away and after another hour, they got back to me telling me they were able to see 2 video folders. 1 that had my files in it but was invisible to DSM, another that was empty but that was visible to DSM. They copied the contents of the invisible folder to the visible folder through SSH, and told me they're going to forward this issue to Taiwan, to their development team to have a look at what happened, and see if they can prevent it in the future. 

 

Long story short, I've got my files back, and Synology is looking into preventing this in the future. This all took less than 18 hours, which is a big plus to me!

Very solid support!