Day: October 22, 2023

This morning I got up as usual. I let the dog out, got a cup of coffee, and woke the computer to check email.

Up to this point everything is normal. I’m not feeling all that great, and I was thinking that it would be nice to take the laptop out to the living room where there’s some cuddle space and the dog would likely curl up beside me. 

Before doing that, I checked the backupstatus, because I’ve got the laptop plugged into a hub that provides an ethernet connection. If you disconnect, it makes the next backup have to clean up the files that were interrupted and it doesn’t take that long to let the machine finish its task.

That’s when I discovered that there hadn’t been any backup since yesterday at 4PM. Then, since inquiring minds want to know, I asked why. The computer said there’s no backup disk.

Hmm. I know there is a backup disk so somebody’s got some splaining to do. 

I go check on the NAS device in the closet. It’s running, but the drive indications are all wrong. There’s no error or warning per se, but the NAS is hammering on 2 drives and not responding to commands. The NAS is also not appearing at the address that it’s supposed to for me to access its control interface. 

I try a “soft” power down the NAS appears to accept that command but never completes the execution of the command. I do a hard power down. Knowing full well that whatever is going on is probably bad.

I power the NAS back up and now I’m greeted with all the drives being normal but there’s a little flashing status light. That light is usually solid. I go back to the computer and find that the NAS is still not at the address it’s supposed to be, nor is it broadcasting that it’s available. After scanning a bit I found an IP address that appeared to be the NAS. I logged in to the control console only to find that the NAS thought I’d moved drives from another NAS, and that I would have to update the NAS software to accomplish this.

Ahh I’m beginning to see the likely problem. The NAS tried to update its software and the update went horribly wrong. I guess I’m lucky that the machine still had some clue what it was, but what about my 10TB of data? What about the Porn?!?

Well there’s no path around, I must go forward. I tell the NAS that the 5 drives contain data and they are to be preserved. Then I tell the NAS it can update to the latest version of software. I didn’t want to do this… I’ve been holding off on updating to the latest (read that as completely redesigned) version of the NAS software because I just didn’t feel like working my way through the headache.

I’ve got data from the other half on that NAS that I’m still sorting through and there is no need to complicate matters with a completely different NAS operating system where I’ll have to rework permissions, connections, and applications.

My plan was to do this update when I was done with the other halfs business. 

However, since I have no choice, I click “Proceed” 

The next screen from the NAS says, “Formatting system volume” OH SHIT!!!!!

Does that mean the area that the NAS uses to store the OS, OR did I just flush all my data?

Well the helpful countdown to completion said I’d know in 9 minutes.

For the next 9 very long minutes I used the time honored prayer of IT workers everywhere.

“SHIT SHIT SHIT FUCK SHIT FUCK SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK!”

After 10 minutes the NAS came back online with a brand new OS and as an added bonus all the user accounts and been wiped. Yea! But the data appears to have remained intact.

So apparently my IT Prayer was heard, and answered, by a benevolent AI somewhere.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I get to reconfigure the NAS and work my way through a new operating system where everything is moved and some features are gone entirely.

Yea! 

I’ve fired up a set of utilities designed to ensure drive integrity to make sure my data is in good shape. I’ll have to configure around the utilities doing their job to reconnect my NonAdmin account to the data. Oh look, the User Accounts, Groups, and Permissions controls are all different… Greeaaattt!

I have a headache that would stop Godzilla, I think I’ve got some sinus thing happening and I really may not have the patience for this…