How to manually access personal files from a degraded QNAP NAS RAID1

As a former ICT responsible I learnt that storing data for a backup is one thing, but restoring data is a whole different story. Let me share my latest experience on accessing personal files from a degraded QNAP NAS RAID1. Hopefully this may help others in a similar situation to get their personal files faster, it took over two weeks in my case.

Damaged user management after power outage

I had a QNAP NAS TS251-A that failed after a power outage. The two disks (4TB each) were still fine. Due to several boot attempts and resetting (3 sec and 10 sec reset) I ended up with a damaged user management on my RAID1 set up. So basically I could start the QNAP NAS but couldn’t login and had no access to my personal files anymore.

Data only accessible through QNAP infrastructure

I tried to run Ubuntu over a Virtual Machine (both over Mac and Windows) to mount the disks remotely, but failed in the end. That was when I realised that my only option was to get another QNAP NAS if I wanted to proceed myself (as recommended by QNAP support). First Learning: My TS251-A was Intel based. I needed to find another working Intel based QNAP NAS to regain access to QTS over QFinder Pro. QNAP provides a link to check for model compatibility. In my case a TS451 that I bought second hand worked fine. Newer models run on ADM and are apparently not suitable. So basically one is working in a closed system where the only way forward is through another Intel-based QNAP device. Second Learning: If you reset your QNAP NAS or put your drives into another QNAP NAS and neither “admin” nor “MAC 1” work to login, remember to also try the “Cloud Key”. In my case user “admin” and the “Cloud Key” on the side of my QNAP enabled me to regain access through QFinder Pro to QTS again. To my disappointment I then realised that getting access to QTS doesn’t mean that one can get access to the personal files simply. My RAID1 user management was degraded and I needed to manually mount the good disk through Mac Terminal SSH connection to get access to my personal files.

Getting access to data over Mac Terminal SSH connection

I decided to get a backup copy of my data before trying to restore the RAID1 on the new QNAP NAS. Some external harddrive formats don’t like semicolon “:”, and you may end up with a substantial part of your files not being copied over. My solution in the end was to copy the files from the QNAP NAS (Linux) through Mac terminal (SSH-access) to an external harddrive (exFAT) plugged into my Mac. This way the semicolons where converted automatically to forward dash and all my files were copied.

Rebuilding QNAP NAS RAID1

Data recovery through QNAPcloud did not work, to my disappointment I was informed that my QNAPcloud backup is not intented to provide a full data recovery and mainly allows recovery of single files through snapshots (QuDeDup extract tool). In the end I had to set up the RAID1 from scratch on my new QNAP NAS and copy the data over from my external hard drive.

Conclusion

I lost confidence in QNAP as a standalone solution for data backup and easy recovery. Not because of the backup system itself, but the fact that it is a locked-in environment. I only realized this once I was hard pressed to get a copy of my personal data that I couldn't access anymore. Thankfully accessing the data over Mac Terminal was a workable solution in my case. I will move on to a system that is more flexible to handle data recovery.