Audio: Listen to this article.
As The Computer Audiophile I often get contacted by audiophiles in a technological pinch. This was the case over the weekend, and I've been working to resolve it for the last couple days. The issue and solution are more tech related than audio related, but when one's unstreamable music is stored on a NAS, it becomes an audio issue.
A great friend of mine had been using a QNAP TS-853 Pro eight bay NAS for several years without an issue. He has a Roon core running on a NUC and roughly 12 Terabytes of music on the TS-853 Pro, on eight 6TB drives in a RAID6 configuration. This configuration allows for two of the eight drives to fail, without losing any of his music. He had no backup USB drives connected to the NAS, no second NAS with a synchronized copy, or even a cloud backup. The time bomb was ticking.
All was fine until I received a text on Saturday morning, while I was on the way to pickup fresh picked strawberries from Little Hill Berry Farm in Northfield, MN. The text stated, "Sometime last night, QNAP went from being operational to "System Booting" and does not recognize any of the drives as indicated by the solid red lights for each HDD. Are you able to remotely connect?"
I wasn't able to connect to it via VPN or the QNAP Cloud because the NAS wouldn't boot up to the operating system. It was stuck on System Booting. I had my friend pull the power cable, remove all the drives, wait a minute or so, then power it back up without the drives. This method can work in some instances, but it wasn't meant to be in this case. Nothing changed. Still stuck at System Booting.
After thinking about it for a few more miles in the car, I hatched a plan to attempt to recover his music. There were many unknowns and plenty of contradictory information available online, but the other option was to do nothing and lose a lot of music. I had him send me the QNAP NAS, so I could start the process.
My idea was to pull the eight spinning drives and one NVMe out of my QNAP TVS-872XT, put his drives into the chassis, cross my fingers, and hope I could jump over the technical hurdles that appeared upon booting my NAS.
Fast forward to Thursday afternoon. I was working on my review of the Schiit Audio Urd CD transport, when UPS delivered the nonfunctioning QNAP TS-853 Pro. I thought I'd check it out and who knows, maybe it would just boot up. I experienced the same System Booting message. My inner geek kicked in, forcing me to set the Schiit Urd aside and focus on solving the riddle of music file recovery.
I removed my drives from my QNAP TVS-872XT, placed his drives in the chassis and hit the power button. Things were looking good, the unit booted up, showed me the IP address on the front display, and didn't offer any warning beeps in the process. I connected to the NAS with a web browser and saw the message that consume my entire day, "Detected Incompatible Disks."
That's when it dawned on me. My NAS runs on the QNAP QuTS Hero operating system and his NAS ran on the QTS operating system. The two systems aren't compatible. Switching from one to the other requires all drives be reformatted. The solution was to remove all the drives from my QNAP and reboot it. Upon powering up, the QuTS hero Smart Installation screen appears, enabling me to select Switch OS QTS.
My NAS then installed the QTS operating system, pulling down the newest version from QNAP automatically, and rebooted without any disks. With the unit running, I put each of his disks into my chassis and crossed my fingers. This was a step in the right direction as I could see a large hard drive volume with many Terabytes used. However, I couldn't access any of the folders that were on his NAS previously because they weren't there. The data seemed to all be there, but I couldn't see it.
When the NAS booted up after the OS switch, it asked me a question about reinitializing it or resetting it. One of those options left all the data intact, the other wiped all the drives. I went with the KEEP MY DATA option, but that's why the unit was in a default state, without any shared folders I needed.
To get the folders back, with all the music files, I went into the QNAP Control Panel > Shared Folders > Create > Shared Folder. This brought up the new shared folder window. I selected Enter Path Manually, clicked the dropdown arrow, and saw all the previous shared folders listed by name. I selected Music Files, then named the new shared folder Music Files to avoid any possible confusion down the road. Once this was done, I had access to all the music files by browsing the QNAP File Station app or by browsing the NAS over my network. It was as if I had his NAS back up and running. I could now recover the data.
I went to Microcenter and purchased a 20TB USB drive. After formatting as exFAT I had roughly 18TB usable space. I didn't want to screw around with a smaller drive that may have matched the space I needed perfectly, only to find out I needed more space for some unforeseen reason. 20TB was the larges drive I could pickup in 20 minutes, so I went with it.
I connected the 20TB drive to the QNAP's USB 3 port, installed QNAP's HBS 3 Hybrid Backup Sync, and setup a one-way sync of all the folders on the NAS to identically named folder on the USB drive, then clicked Start. This utility is really nice for backing up data, but isn't perfect. I've discovered it won't copy files with quotation marks in the file names, but for this sync I told it to convert reserved characters, not knowing if there are any songs with quotes in the names or if that would even resolve the issue. It was worth a shot anyway.
Looking forward and Recommendations
While the backup sync to USB was running, I talked to my friend about his music storage needs. He said the TS-853 Pro was a little noisy when the hard drives churned for no apparent reason, so replacing it with an SSD based NAS was preferred. I looked at TrueNAS, but couldn't guarantee a trueNAS Mini would be quieter given its use of a fan.
I told him to order the QNAP TS-i410X four bay fanless NAS with four 8TB Samsung 2.5" QVO drives. This will be more than enough space for now and guarantee silent operation. When the NAS and drives arrive at my house I will get the unit setup, then create a one-way sync job to copy the backed up data from the USB drive to the TS-i410X NAS. Once the data is copied to the NAS, I will reverse the direction of the sync job and create a schedule that automatically backs up everything on the NAS to this attached USB drive every night.
The attached USB drive will remain formatted as exFAT. This way, if the NAS dies, a Mac, Linux, or Windows machine can at least read the data on the drive if needed, without jumping through any hoops. Replacing this new NAS would also be pretty straight forward as one would run the sync from the USB drive to a new NAS, in the identical way I did when setting it up.
I will also recommend my friend use iDrive for offsite cloud storage. The iDrive app runs on QNAP and can use any schedule one wants to backup data to the cloud. iDrive is incredibly cheap. I think I'm paying less than $200 per year for around 20TB and I love it. Data backed up to the cloud could come in handy if for whatever reason, both the new QNAP and USB drives are unavailable (fire, theft, etc...).
One finally note, there is talk online about other QNAP units with this system booting message and fixing it by adding a resistor to the motherboard. Such a repair is beyond my skillset and a bit sketchy for me because I have no clue if the repair would last or cause other issues. For all I know it could be perfect or start a fire. I wasn't willing to take a risk or possible waste more time, when I had a perfect solution going forward.
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