Author Topic: When everything works!!!  (Read 1540 times)

JMRibault

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When everything works!!!
« on: November 23, 2009, 03:01:01 PM »
   

I have a Buffalo Pro duo 1T (LS-W1.0TGL/T1-V3).

 

A couple of months ago I had a catastrophic loss of data on it and I could not get back to a bootable state, I finally purchase and used a EXT3 XFS data recovery system (directly from windows) and recovered part of my data. I was a little bit disappointed but mostly to of my own ignorance on how to use a back-up system. I was able to repair the NAS by forcing a firmware update, bought a USB (pro drive from Toshiba) drive and connected to my NAS has a back-up only system...

 

Last week end, we had a power surge and my NAS went under. Annoyed from my previous experience I figured I was going to spend quite a bit of time and loose again quite a bit of data... Well I was mostly wrong (for the better). The data was safe! Although I had to restructure my RAID 1 array ( force update the NAS and reformat all - for some reason, data corruption even prevented to boot the NAS with both HDD connected), I was able to recover from the USB back-up after a mere day.

 

The real concern was the fact that I had to reformat the USB Drive to XFS file format and none of my other platform are able to read the data beside the NAS...

 

So Kudos to the buffalo team, and please make your product able to Read/Write NTFS at one point (especially for the USB back-up) so at least if the Box goes completely out, one could read the data from and plain old PC...


daoswald

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Re: When everything works!!!
« Reply #1 on: November 24, 2009, 12:47:39 AM »
   

I think the ability to automatically back up to USB is one of the most important features of Buffalo's NAS's.  I sleep soundly knowing that when my NAS eventually fails I can restore from the USB drive.  I did think about the issue of not being able to restore the XFS file system to a windows machine.  Some would say just format the USB drive to FAT32, which is one of the alternatives that the NAS offers for its external USB drives.  One cannot write to a FAT32 drive plugged into the NAS, but the NAS's backup feature can back-up to FAT32 formatted drives.  However, this isn't an ideal solution for everyone.  I use my NAS to store photos and HD video that I've captured on my camcorder.  Some of those files can possibly exceed the 2GB limit of a FAT32 drive.  For this reason I chose the XFS format for my USB backup drives.  So how do I intend to restore if the NAS fails?  In the unlikely event of a total failure of the NAS, I'll just pick up a used model used on an auction site and restore to it.  Sure, that will cost a few dollars, but my NAS has already lasted me four years.  That's about $60 per year so far, and getting cheaper as time goes by.  Through the principle of "reduction to the rediculous", I can justify the expense.