Why you don't buy a nonredundant home NAS - catastrofail

[jgreco]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/the_cloud_that_goes_puff_seagate_central_home_nas_woes/

I'm sure that many of you here get tasked with "IT support" for your families. This is a perfect example of how bad it can get. Not only is the storage nonredundant, leaving you open to the possibility of data loss due to drive failure, but apparently the Seagate Central Home NAS also uses some rather unusual Linuxisms that make it difficult to recover the data off the device even when hooked up to a standard Linux box. And having to rip apart the entire unit in order to get at the drive?

There are lots of other units out there that have great features, can mirror drives, and are still dirt cheap:


$80. Cheap enough you can buy two so you have a second unit that you can even rsync to.

I have spent far too many years explaining to people why their data is unretrievable because they had no backups and trusted a single magic disk.

On a related-but-different gripe, a quote from TheReg article: "The cloud has its problems, but you are less likely to lose data on OneDrive or DropBox than to wake up and discover that your home NAS has gone clunk in the night."

Oh, really? I don't know. I've got data I've been carting around since at least the '80's... I don't and can't trust services that were effectively just invented yesterday to have a business model and be profitable tomorrow. Look at the demise of AltaVista, MySpace, HP Upline, Canonical Ubuntu One, Iron Mountain, Apple MobileMe, etc.

The magic mix is probably to do a little of both: a high(er) availability solution for the home combined with a cloud service or remote NAS for disaster recovery. Sure, what I suggest isn't anywhere near as cheap as a Seagate Central 4TB ($175, so that's only around $30 more than a bare HDD!) ... but if you're going to store data, don't you want to be able to retrieve it?

 

[Jailer]

Great reminder. A recent hard drive failure is what led me to explore other options for my data storage. I didn't lose anything critical but I did lose a lot of stuff I wish I still had.

I am soooo glad I found freenas. I'm still early in the learning stages but it has so far turned out to be everything I was looking for and more and the support and knowledge on this site has been invaluable.

 

[jgreco]

It particularly pained me when I discovered that my ex-sister-in-law had all the pictures of her kids growing up and assorted other treasures stored on an external 1TB drive, which, of course, eventually gave out and took all those family memories along with it, and she came to me with the drive asking me what was wrong with it.

To make matters worse, she passed away a few years ago and her kids were basically left with few pictures from their childhood.

 

[Jailer]

I have a friend that I'm trying to persuade away from this very line of thinking. I'm having a difficult time getting across the concept of "single point of failure". He's completely stuck on the cost aspect of having to purchase drives for redundancy. "I can't afford to" is what I can't get him away from. I've tried everything to convince him that he can't afford not to. I do this of course because he will come to me to fix when it all comes crashing down.

He steadfastly refuses to buy server hardware before going forward with his NAS project. I think I'll donate a couple of old drives to him so he at least has some redundancy and can replace and resilver them in the future. That and I'm going to move him away from freenas to save him the headache of trouble down the road.

 

[anodos]

Definitely have known plenty of people who have suffered data loss because the single magic disk wasn't so magical. I usually have someone approach me about once every couple of months with a clicking external hard drive.

I personally got burned in the past with using DVDs for data backups (back when hard drives weren't much larger than that). One key thing about backups is that it needs to be fairly quick and easy to verify their integrity.

 

[Starpulkka]

Yeah i hear a lot "why would i need more disks, i can keep moving files this one device many many years.." Sister husband is hard case he backups to single DVD-RW media. But its money always win, people dont put value they data until after they no longer have that data. Lately i have found smartmontools to windows and hdsentinel, i wich someone have told me before those smartmontools on windows. Installed all those "family it" machines and already have been success cases where data loss would be certain without smartmontools.

 

[Ericloewe]

64k blocks? Who the %!#@ came up with that bright idea?

"Management says our product is too reliable, too compatible and too easy to recover from. We need simple ideas that'll allow us to break as much compatibility as possible."
"We could use a stupid block size that renders the drive unreadable by most distros."

 

[jgreco]

"We could use a stupid block size that renders the drive unreadable by most distros."

That's because they were too stupid^Wlazy^W....what? to go for the full enchilada and make their own proprietary filesystem, which would give them a possible leg up if they wanted to enter the data recovery market.

 

[anodos]

That's because they were too stupid^Wlazy^W....what? to go for the full enchilada and make their own proprietary filesystem, which would give them a possible leg up if they wanted to enter the data recovery market.

I think that's where you reach the point of diminishing returns on stupidity. Once a filesystem has a bad reputation, it is almost impossible to fix it. Exhibit A: reiserfs. With stupid asinine things like mentioned above you don't have to worry about developing a stable fs.

 

[DaNilePharaoh]

The magic mix is probably to do a little of both

this quote should be a Sticky :)