TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

As storage gets cheaper, more and more people are using NAS devices. Many of these are relatively small (6-10 Tb).  These can be backed up on a single external USB hard drive. However, many exceed 20 Tb, and there are a lot of people out there running 40 Tb or more. Of course, these people purchased their NAS specifically for the very high capacity, redundancy and fault-tolerance of these devices.  Many run two-fault-tolerant arrays, dual redundant power supplies, dual UPS, and at least one hot spare.  They are as bulletproof as possible. However, they are not perfect .  So it only makes sense to try to have a last-resort backup of everything that's on a NAS. So - how do we do that? Options are limited: 1.  Go cloud storage.  Yeah, great if you want to spend $200+ per month . Oh, and all those "hacks" for "free / unlimited" options - they're either gone, going, or never worked anyway. 2.  Buy a second NAS and mirror it.  Great ...

I mean, why rummage through your box of unused drives when it's too late?  Create a UFEI boot drive now, plug it into an unused (and fairly inaccessible) USB port on your PC, and you're ready to go whenever.  Makes backup and recovery a lot easier. Taping the boot shortcut key for your PC to your monitor won't hurt, either. So far, the boot environment of Macrium Reflect seems to work pretty well. I don't like their file naming system, but I can live with it. I haven't actually tried a bare-metal restore with it yet.

Problem: Synology Rackstation (or Diskstation) reboots endlessly.  Power LED blinks, ALERT LED blinks.  Some drive LEDs green, most are red (or orange).  One drive LED might blink indicating drive activity.  LAN connection LEDs are dark (inactive).  No access.  Solution:  Try powering it off, pulling all drives, peripherals and RAM, and rebooting.  (Don't forget any USB peripherals, like a UPS.) If the Power/ALERT light behavior persists, and it doesn't return to a solid-on Power light in about a minute - your Rackstation is dead. Or, at least, it took Synology support chat < 60 seconds to conclude mine was dead.  Maybe you will be more fortunate. Synology would not confirm in my case, but I can't help but think the dreaded Intel C2000 bug could cause this. BAD NEWS:  Unless your unit is in warranty, or covered under the Atom +1 year extended warranty , you are SOL. GOOD NEWS:  Your data is most likely OK!  You ...