Lightning damage help and vital LAN advice!

[tiberious1001]

Hello,
I have a TS-119 II that I've had running for years, I've always kept the firmware up to date but I can't remember the version number. About a week or so ago we had an awesome thunderstorm, awesome until we got a direct hit. We have a lightning strip across the roof so luckily didn't affect the power or do much structural damage however the EMP from the bolt of lightning fried everything with a LAN cable in the back of it. Virgin media router, 50" plasma TV, 3 gigabit switches are all dead. PC, Xbox and Qnap NAS all turn on but with the LAN ports dead. Xbox connects over wireless and I've just bought a usb 3 to LAN adapter for the PC.

I also bought a ASUS USB-AC51 wifi dongle (Compatibility list says it should work) for the NAS as any connection is better than no connection but without being able to log on to the NAS to change any settings will this just simply start working? I've set the dongle up with correct configuration settings but nothing happens when in the USB 3 port in the back of the NAS.

Is there a way of accessing the QNAP desktop through USB?

So now some vital advice for people with LAN cables trailing all over their house. Buy LAN cable lightning surge protectors. They aren't too expensive and hopefully might prevent the level of damage done to all my equipment.

[dolbyman]

You will be SOL, there is no way to configure the dongle as the NAS needs you to access to the WEB GUI to make any changes.

A USB connection (how would you connect to the NAS it's a HOST device?) will not work (it's a NAS not a DAS)

To access your files, take out the drive and read it with a linux live boot on any computer, if the drive survived, it should be pretty easy (plain ext file system on these decade old units.)

If it was a new NAS system, reading internal drives is not so easy.

If you ever get your data back.. external backups have to be done at all times or you will lose your data eventually

[tiberious1001]

Thanks for the reply, fingers crossed for the data. All the lights on the front including the LAN light flashes so hopefully just one little component on the LAN side fried. So if I were to just drop the HDD into a modern Synology NAS would see it and read it straight away?

[dolbyman]

NAS manufactures clear disks for their own use ..so inserting a foreign disk will clear all data on it

see here for a qnap migration path (temporary as a crippled legacy volume will be created)
https://www.qnap.com/en/nas-migration

why was there no backups?(even more so on a single bay system with no redundancy)

[tiberious1001]

It's a 6Tb drive and budget dictates only 1 of those. Anything important is backed up on OneDrive but to be honest it's almost entirely pirated movies, music and TV series so no devastating loss in terms of content. Just hard earned money if the drive is dead. Thanks for pointing out the migration page.