I am trying to read the data from an HDD operated in HS-264, on another PC. The OS on the NAS is QTS 5.2.6.3195. Each of 2 drives on the NAS has just 1 static volume on it, with no encryption. Both drives pass all the SMART tests and are normally operable on the NAS. However, when I unmount one of the drives, connect it to a laptop via an external USB controller, I cannot access the data on it. The laptop detects the drive correctly, shows its general parameters like the total size, reports the volume is there, but displays “Unknown content”.
The laptop runs Windows, so I tried DiskInternals Linux Reader, as well as creating a bootable Linux USB (Tails in particular), both with the same result.
Sounds trivial, but no solution so far. Am I missing something?
Thanks for a quick reply. I have tried UFS Explorer Standard Recovery with the same result: “No valid/supported file system”.
I have a multi-tier data backup system, no data loss is at stake fortunately.
So is this a normal and expected behavior that these QNAP-formatted disks cannot be read on another device, at least not with a help of a data recovery expert? Sounds very awkward: the manufacturer officially states there is an EXT4 file system on the internal discs, why cannot they be read on a different Linux system while unencrypted? Still feels like I am missing something. Should have created a different storage type, some “Storage Pool” or something? Or my external USB interface does not work properly?
Unless something malicious or catastrophic happened to the disk (it was never mentioned why the disks needs to be read externally from the NAS, even more so when there are backups), UFSExplorer should be able to read it. (QNAP never makes any promises that the disk(s) can easily be read outside of the NAS)
The QNAP disks contain several partitions, besides the OS and swap ones, there is a data partition, that can also have an LVM construct on top (storage pools, snapshots, etc)
Plugging drives into random systems and trying random utilities to access the data is a sure way to corrupt data. NAS internal drives are not intended to be read from other systems. If you “portability”, then use external drives and export the data. QNAP published a migration path should a NAS fail and the drives need to be loaded into another system. Back in the day, the NAS O\S was proprietary to the vendor. Then they mostly became lazy (and smart) and switched to standard , but modified, operating systems and disk formats, but the intent to read he data directly was never something they wanted to do. To many things can go wrong.
I had not mentioned the reason of this hassle, sorry: I am just exploring possible data recovery scenarios in case the NAS becomes inoperable for some reason, that’s all. So it seems the simple recovery option I would expect to work will not work in reality (as it usually happens in such cases :D). That means in case of a NAS HW fault, even if the disks a perfectly fine, the access to the data is lost (at least for me, as I am not an expert in data recovery). Quite a disappointing fetaure in my opinion, but better to know about it.
This is why you have a backup strategy. Data that is important, should exist in more than one place. RAID is not a backup.
This is also why my backup strategy includes replicating the data on different NAS boxes (different vendors) as well as having identical physical NAS boxes sitting in their original boxes ready to go, cloud storage and external drives. Obviously only you can decide how much time, money and effort your data is worth and what you willing to protect against and how much recovery will cost in time and effort.
Yes, I already have a system of multiple off-line (meaning off-NAS) data backups. The new info for me here is the NAS is a somewhat weaker point than I initially thought, and I will have to backup off-NAS more often, that’s it. It should be a good practice anyway though.
If you are doing incremental backups, online backups go pretty quickly. The biggest time taken is really scanning your NAS for changes. I do an incremental backup every night to my iDrive account. It takes generally all night to do it but I have about 14 TB stored in the cloud now and backed up every night.