UPDATE: Well, I got a bit anxious about losing my "chance" to get to data last night, so I started downloading the missing data last night. Using FTP to pull to my PC, not by running the Buffalo backup job that would run it to the other NAS. I have no why I think this, but it seemed like that might be more demanding on the system and more problematic... just crazy? or right?
It seemed to be working though and the system is still up this morning! (So continuing the process)
I have no idea what was happening. I'm guessing that the repeated forced reboots from the power button probably damaged the drive (somehow)
and that "allowed" a disk error to occur that interrupted whatever else was happening before. ??
I will order a drive to swap for now. I don't know if I'll be able to figure out the original problem though.
Three questions remaining though:
1) Should I still run the firmware update at this point? (before/after the drive is replaced?)
2) Do NAS devices generally need to be replaced every few years? I got this back in July 2013, and mostly it's been fine, but this will be the third drive I've had to replace, (no idea if that means anything). Plus there's no direct support options from Buffalo at this point. (Just begging on this forum
) So should I be looking to replace this system?
3) If I do upgrade the NAS and it's not due to all the drives being dead for some reason, can hard drives be swapped or added into new NAS devices in some way that retains the data? Or does the process always mean getting all the data to something else, then moving it all back onto the new NAS?
(I use RAID5 here and from my limited understanding of how that works, I'm mostly assuming that it's the latter, but just wanted to check.) Thank you!