My QNAS TS-212-E was working perfectly until we recently had a power failure and now I cannot link wirelessly (my normal setup). I am running Linux Mint 18.2 on my computer and until this incident had little trouble with the NAS. Normally I can see the contents of the NAS when I switch on my PVR in the living room and go through the menu, now it sees the NAS but not the folders. I'm no expert on techie things but I usually know how to fix the odd simple glitch. Unfortunately, this has me baffled. My BT router knows the NAS is connected and has assigned a port, but my computer cannot connect and my samba connect is completely lost.
I have a lot of files and folders I cannot afford to lose ... perhaps there is a way to get the files off the NAS and then scrub the system and reinstall whatever is necessary to get the NAS up and running again.
Incidentally, I tried the QNAS forum over a week ago and nobody has come forward with a solution.
Any advice will be appreciated.

gael

Do you have the same behaviour when using wired connections? Generally for anything of this nature where wireless "drops off" my first troubleshooting is to simplify the network as much as possible.

In addition, What do you mean by your computer cannot connect?

Have you verified the status LEDs/LCD panel show the system is working?

Can you connect to the NAS via a web browser?

https://www.qnap.com/en/download?mod...gory=documents

Okay, I'll try to explain. The LED's are all showing 'normal' on the front panel. I tried to glean some info from the NAS by typing a command in the CLI and this is what I got.
gael33@pceanadach ~ $ ssh admin@NAS_IP
ssh: connect to host nas_ip port 22: Connection timed out
gael33@pceanadach ~ $
I tried several times both directly wired and wireless and got the same result.
The NAS appears to be on and working according to the LEDs.
I cannot cannot connect via the Web Browser or Samba.

gael

I assume that you have shutdown and restarted the NAS.

Your firmware might be corrupted.

I would try the firmware test by removing the drives, (make sure you mark/remember which drive goes in which slot and be careful) power up the NAS and wait until you here the beeps.

https://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Firmware_Recovery

I don't know anything about this model NAS, but I can take a stab at something that might work - and be a better solution long term.

IF you're going to be removing the drives anyway, you can try and install them in your Linux Mint computer (assuming it's not a laptop, and it has enough space for it, and you have SATA cables for it).

Then, IF it's using a simple software RAID or LVM or something pretty ordinary, then Linux Mint may simply see the data so you can mount it simply by clicking on the drive icon.

If it works, then you could create a suitable /etc/fstab entry to automount it, and you could use your Linux Mint computer as a file server rather than the NAS box. This will generally simplify your maintenance issues, improve security, and reduce power consumption.

It will also improve performance when you access the files from your Linux Mint computer, obviously, but it can indirectly improve performance for other computers/devices simply by reducing the amount of wifi bandwidth consumed.

Also, cooling airflow is also better in a typical desktop computer than a consumer level NAS box.

After some googling I could not find an absolute guide on how to mount the drives using linux. There was one post although 8 years old that indicated QNAP used a patched ext3 driver so it was not possible. I don't know what the current firmware version uses.

For the future A NAS/RAID device is not a backup especially if it is the only place where you have files that you can not afford to lose.

I take it you've powered everything off, then powered the router on first before powering on the other devices? Then, of course, checked the IP address that the router shows for the NAS and confirmed it has not changed?

I downloaded the manual for the correct model and from what I could ascertain, there is a wee hole (almost invisible to the naked eye) in the back panel between the power and the Ethernet socket that is for resetting the unit to default. However, it does say that none of the folders and files would be lost although it was a little vague as to whether or not I would lose the previous settings. So as the unit was useless when not working, I threw caution to the wind and poked around in the hole marked reset. Lo and behold and with a lot of flashing LEDs and clicking noises, the unit sprung to life. The PVR in the living room found the NAS, the computer found the NAS and keeping my fingers crossed, the unit appears to be working again as normal.
So may I take this opportunity to thank everyone who gave valuable and sensible suggestions that I diligently followed.

Thanks again,
gael.

I'd suggest you think about investing in an internal hard drive big enough to store everything that's currently on the NAS (or less if there's only a certain fraction that you truly care about).

You can then use rsync to copy over everything from the NAS and keep the backup synced up. After the mirror is complete, you can then transition various devices to look at the new drive's share instead of the NAS.

You can then use rsync in the other direction to use the NAS as a backup. If you have a second computer, though, it would make more sense to remove the hard drives from the NAS and put them in a second computer. By transitioning from whatever weird proprietary storage format the NAS uses to vanilla ext4 partitions, you will ensure you can get at your data in case the host computer fails (but the hard drive is still okay).

Thanks for the advice. My computer is in my office, my NAS is in another room and my PVR is in yet another location. I use my NAS to stream movies, music and recorded TV series for personal entertainment in the evenings with my family. When everything is working it's ideal. To be honest, in the three or four years I have had the NAS this is the first time I have had something go wrong that I couldn't fix within minutes. I've now attached an external USB drive to the NAS and so all I have to do now is figure out how to copy the contents of the NAS onto that drive.

gael

gael

If it were a normal computer instead of a proprietary NAS box, you could simply ssh into the computer and use rsync to copy over the data.

That's the sort of thing which has kept me away from file server appliance devices. It's easier for me when all of my servers and even my router are running Debian. I don't have to learn how to do things via different proprietary interfaces. I just learn how to do something in Debian once and voila! I know how to do it on all my stuff.

I know that strategy isn't for everyone, and it may not be right for you. I'm just putting the idea out there.

As for your specific problem - I don't know how you have your network configured. If it's possible to move the NAS somewhere so that there's a wired connection between the computer and the NAS, then you could connect the USB drive to your computer and use rsync. Then, incremental updates via rsync can be done wirelessly.

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