TS-869 Pro lost a bunch of data!

[pteittinen]

Hardware: TS-869 Pro running fw 4.2.3 build 20170121

So what happened? I went on a vacation and decided to save some electricity so I powered down my TS-869 Pro by pressing the power button on its front panel. It powered down smoothly.

A week later I come back and power up the NAS, then boot up my Windows PC and start working. At some point I download a new installation file of a software, and proceed to save it in the "Utils" directory on the QNAP. But there is no longer a "Utils" directory on the NAS. It has vanished without a trace.

To add insult to injury, that directory contained all the software I've bought and paid for over the past 5 years.

Is there anything I can do to restore that directory and the data contained within?

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

basically your qnap was turned off before you went on vacation. no problem last you checked before shutdown?

just soon after boot up you noticed the missing folder?

did your QTS logs indicate any failure ? what raid are you using? what drives?

according to the download page, the latest stable firmware is
4.3.3.0188 build 20170516 released on 2017/05/18

https://www.qnap.com/en/product_x_down/ ... .php?II=24


you may want to update (only after you first consult with qnap support what to do) at some point, if only to fix security vulnerabilities were patched (especially for the ones tagged as critical vulnerabilities)
https://www.qnap.com/en/support/con_show.php?cid=41


only thing that comes to mind is maybe raid failed? (or maybe there is a different reason) create a support ticket here and check with qnap support what steps need to be done ( expect a reply within 3 working days. if no response by then send a gentle reminder with your ticket number. while waiting for their reply you can also ask here on the forum as a secondary source of help/suggestions)
https://helpdesk.qnap.com/


if you really want to expedite if it's a time sensitive matter you can call the nearest technical hotline closest to you, though i suggest first making a support ticket regardless
https://www.qnap.com/en/about/con_show. ... wone&cid=1


i hope you had a backup? if not.... well you may want to invest in a backup plan. there a few solutions, either having a 2nd physical unit as backup, or what a majority of people do is cloud backup (encrypted of course since it's in the cloud) e.g. crashplan, hubic, amazon cloud drive etc...


if somehow some of your files at some point got deleted on your desktop/laptop (not qnap) you could try recuva to recover some old files that got deleted. it's something at least for the meantime (no i don't reckon it will work for raid failures, thats what backups are for)

https://www.piriform.com/recuva

[pteittinen]

basically your qnap was turned off before you went on vacation. no problem last you checked before shutdown?

Nothing qnap deemed worthy of emailing me about, at least.

just soon after boot up you noticed the missing folder?

I noticed the missing folder approx. 10 minutes after boot up.

did your QTS logs indicate any failure ?

No indication of any failure in the logs.

what raid are you using? what drives?

RAID-6 consisting of three Western Digital 3TB WD30EFRX HDDs and three HGST 3TB HDN724030 HDDs. Total capacity 10.76 TBs.

only thing that comes to mind is maybe raid failed?

I see nothing in the logs or qnap's current performance to suggest the raid failed. It's running fine right now, except that the folder has disappeared.

i hope you had a backup?

I've got most of my data backed up on external 8TB archival drives, but, par for the course, I hadn't backed up this particular folder to archival drives in a long while :/

[P3R]

Check the network recycle bin, if you had it enabled.

[AlastairStevenson]

OK, so the Utils shared folder is not visible over the network from a Windows PC.
Does it still show via the File explorer in the QTS GUI?
Or via an SSH shell?

[pteittinen]

OK, so the Utils shared folder is not visible over the network from a Windows PC.
Does it still show via the File explorer in the QTS GUI?
Or via an SSH shell?

There's only one share on the NAS, and Utils folder was under that, i.e. Utils folder wasn't a share of its own. There's no sign of Utils folder anywhere. All the other stuff inside the share appears to be intact. This is both peculiar and worrying; I'm not sure if I can trust the NAS anymore.

[P3R]

There's only one share on the NAS...

Not all the default shared folders?

Where did they go?

Did you check all the places AlastairStevenson suggested?

Did you check the recycle bin?

[pteittinen]

There's only one share on the NAS...

Not all the default shared folders?
Where did they go?

Ah, sorry, should have been clearer. I meant there's only one user-created share, in addition to default shared folders. The recycle bin is not enabled, and I'm 100% certain I did not delete the folder myself.

[AlastairStevenson]

There's no sign of Utils folder anywhere.

If you are only looking via the network mapped drive - definitely worth checking both with the QTS File explorer, and via an SSH shell.

As well as looking under where the folder originally was, take a good look around (maybe by a search using a filename unlikely to be in other folders) to see if the folder has been inadvertently moved. This is pretty easy to do, even without realising.

[pteittinen]

I've now tried everything I can think of, and there's no doubt in my mind the Utils folder is quite simply gone. It was there when I shut down the 869, and disappeared during or right after powering up the 869 again a week later.

All my software purchases of the past 5 years are gone. I know, I know, it's my fault for not having a proper backup... So what can I try next?

[schumaku]

Hi,

Understand the Utils folder was a shared folder configured on the NAS.

Where was the storage location for the Utils folder - within an existing shared folder ... if yes, which one?

Things you might consider:

- Run a check on the NAS volume file system
- Check the volume for an Utils (or utils?) folder
- Have an eye in the Wednesday 03:00 (local) configuration backup, see below

Just the config file ...

Assuming you have not removed the config backup script from crontab, you find a tar archive on the first storage volume - taken every Wednesday around 03:00 local, ad your NAS is commonly booted and operational at that time.

[~] # ls -ls /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.@backup_config/
total 4440
456 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 463358 Jun 7 03:04 0_20170607_0304.tar.gz
452 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 462786 May 31 03:04 1_20170531_0304.tar.gz
452 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 462148 May 24 03:04 2_20170524_0304.tar.gz
...

Here the backup folder on a legacy NAS using a RAID as the first volume:

[~] # ls -ls /share/MD0_DATA/.@backup_config/
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 7043 Jun 13 03:04 0_20120613_0304.tar.gz
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 7043 Jun 6 03:04 1_20120606_0304.tar.gz
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 7043 May 30 03:04 2_20120530_0304.tar.gz
...

...similar on a single disk first volume:

[~] # ls -ls /share/HDA_DATA/.@backup_config/
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 7043 Jun 13 03:04 0_20120613_0304.tar.gz
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 7043 Jun 6 03:04 1_20120606_0304.tar.gz
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 admin administ 7043 May 30 03:04 2_20120530_0304.tar.gz
...

From there you should be able to restore the lost file. Any admin changes to the NAS or it's shares since the last Wednesday need to be redone in case.

For safety, I suggest to restore to an alternate place, and compare:

[~] # cd /
[/] # cd /share/Public
[/share/Public] # mkdir restore
[/share/Public] # cd restore/
[/share/Public/restore] # tar -xvzf /share/MD0_DATA/.@backup_config/0_20120615_0631.tar.gz
etc/config/apache/apache.conf
etc/config/iscsi_trgt.conf
etc/config/smb.conf
etc/config/smb.conf.cksum
etc/config/uLinux.conf
...

Now have an eye in etc/config/smb.conf for the definition of the Utils shared folder ...

[pteittinen]

Understand the Utils folder was a shared folder configured on the NAS.(...) Where was the storage location for the Utils folder - within an existing shared folder ... if yes, which one?

The shared folder is called "media", and "Utils" was a folder under "media".

Things you might consider:
- Run a check on the NAS volume file system
- Check the volume for an Utils (or utils?) folder
- Have an eye in the Wednesday 03:00 (local) configuration backup, see below

I'll take a closer look at the configuration backup; thank you very much for the suggestion.

Meanwhile, I created a ticket at Qnap support, and an engineer connected to my NAS remotely. He couldn't find any trace of the Utils folder. When asked for data recovery solutions, he replied I should contact 3rd party data recovery vendors.

He did suggest that since the Guest account was set to allow read/write/delete, perhaps someone accessed my NAS and deleted the folder. I find this incredibly unlikely for several reasons. Also, if someone got into my NAS, why'd they delete only the Utils folder instead of wiping everything?

///

I installed PhotoRec and ran it for 80 hours. It recovered half a million files to an external HDD - but they all have random filenames, i.e. they are pretty much useless. Can anyone recommend a data recovery solution that restores the original filenames as well?

Thanks!

[pteittinen]

- Have an eye in the Wednesday 03:00 (local) configuration backup, see below
[~] # ls -ls /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.@backup_config/

Yes, I discovered several configuration backups in this directory.

Here the backup folder on a legacy NAS using a RAID as the first volume:
[~] # ls -ls /share/MD0_DATA/.@backup_config/

MD0_DATA does not exist on my NAS.

[~] # ls -ls /share/HDA_DATA/.@backup_config/

This directory exists, but it was empty.

For safety, I suggest to restore to an alternate place, and compare
...
Now have an eye in etc/config/smb.conf for the definition of the Utils shared folder ...

I restored a configuration from May 10th to /share/Public/restore and can view the contents of "smb.conf".. but how does this help?