Hi - there is no official “disaster recovery plan” - I try to re create all kinds of failures, and practice how to get out of these failures, without losing any data. The first one I had recently was a client with a TVS-h1288X. Both SSD’s became corrupt and prevented the QNAP from booting up. I had the client remove all the SATA drives, and I still could not boot up. I went to the client location, and saw that I could boot up with NO DRIVES (no SSD’s or no SATA drives - SSD’s were Storage Pool 1) - so I just installed the SSD’s (no SATA drives) and saw that SSD #2 had failed but SSD 1 was corrupt, and I could not get into the user interface. So I did a factory init on the system with the one working SSD (I did not have a second one for the RAID 1 configuration) - and the system came up. I then shut down, put in the SATA drives, and booted back up (so I did not do a “safe removal” of storage pool 2 - because I could not get into the user interface. Storage Pool 2 (the 8 drives in a RAID 6 group) appeared empty. I called QNAP support, and I was told that I did this process incorrectly. I should have just booted up with the 8 drives (no SSD’s, no Storage Pool 1) - and the system would have booted. QNAP support assisted me in re connecting the Storage Pool 2 RAID group, and the client data reappeared.
I knew that I had another problem client the next day, so on my practice QNAP system - I went into my TS-h886, and simply tried to remove Storage Pool 1 - and the system would not let me do that - even though I removed all the folders (except Public, which I pointed out in my original post). So to repeat, with the QuTS System Files on Storage Pool 1 (2 SSD’s RAID 1) - and the data on the SATA drives (Storage Pool 2) - I could not remove Storage Pool 1. That is why I created this post.
the following day, I called my client for their problem. This was a TVS-h1688X that was set up incorrectly. The person that set it up, created 6 storage pools RAID 0, with 2 drives in each pool. The Storage Pool 1 that had all the System Files was SATA drives 1+2. There was a TL-D1600S expander on the system - setup the same way, being used for backup. On the TL-D1600S, I deleted all the Storage Pools. The client installed new Seagate Ironwolf Pro 28 TB SATA drives, and I created a single RAID 6 group Storage Pool. We used Hybrid Backup Sync to backup all the data from the main TVS-h1688X.
We shut down, and had the client remove ALL the drives and SSD’s from the TVS-h1688X - leaving the expander chassis TL-D1600S connected. We booted up, and to my suprise, the system booted perfectly, and I could see all the data on the TL-D1600S. Of course, in Storage & Snapshots, all the little “Storage Pools” on the main system showed ERROR - because there were no drives in the TVS-h1688X. I removed ALL the storage pools on the TVS-h1688X (the data was now safe and visible on the TL-D1600S) and the client now put in 12 new 28 TB SATA drives in the TVS-h1688X, and 2 SSD’s. Now I was able to start from “ground zero” and build Storage Pool 1 on the 2 SSD’s, and Storage Pool 2 on the 12 new SATA drives. I could now use Hybrid Backup Sync to restore all the data from the TL-D1600S back to the newly built TVS-h1688X.
To be clear - I was able to remove Storage Pool 1 on the TVS-h1688X because there were no drives for Storage Pool 1, and it showed up as “ERROR”. So I could remove storage pool 1. But when there are drives installed and storage pool 1 is build now with the QuTS system info - it appears that you cannot remove Storage Pool 1 (even if nothing is wrong - and you just want to do it - just for practice). When you click on those 3 dots to REMOVE STORAGE POOL - that is not a choice when it’s Storage Pool 1 with QuTS 5.2.8.
Bob Zelin
