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Hello

It's at times like these that I'm forced to realise how little I actually know about how to operate the fvdw firmware. The fact that it runs in Linux (with which I'm totally unfamiliar) doesn't help me to understand it of course.

My normal routine is to record movies to the NS2, but occasionally I record a movie instead to my desktop PC's <Users> folder (my desktop runs Windows 10) and move it to the NS2 subsequently. Yesterday in Windows I moved three movies which had been recorded to my desktop PC to the "Recorded TV" folder on the NS2. (I did this in Windows File Explorer). They are there now.

But meanwhile a whole slew of the movies I most recently recorded to the NS2 and which were there the last time I checked (four or five of them at least, if I remember rightly) have simply vanished! I have no idea at all what might cause such a thing to happen, nor what to do to try to recover them or if that is even possible.

With your help I set-up two Cron Scheduler jobs some time ago to make backups, one of them of the <Recorded TV> share. They are sent to a usb hard drive plugged into the front socket on my NS2. Because I don't run the NS2 24/7 the Cron jobs are run at irregular intervals (when the NS2 happens to be on). The last log for the Recorded TV job was 24 Feb 2016. I presume that means that that was the date on which that job was last run?

HOWEVER having SSD'd into the Recorded_TV share directory on the attached usb drive, I find that it mirrors the now-current state of that folder as it appears in Windows on my desktop PC. The missing movies are not there but the three movies I added only yesterday are!!! It seems to me that something very funny is going on.

Have you any idea what it might possibly be? I certainly have none. I'm very upset about losing these recordings, which I valued, and I'd like to get them back - and certainly avoid any repetition of this kind of thing.

Might the NS2's drive perhaps be on its last legs and beginning to become erratic? SMART is giving it a clean bill of health but tonight I intend running a long self-test just to be sure.

Any suggestions you can offer would be very welcome.

Hi Fuddyduddy

Fuddyduddy wrote:The last log for the Recorded TV job was 24 Feb 2016. I presume that means that that was the date on which that job was last run?

Yes that is

Fuddyduddy wrote:HOWEVER having SSD'd into the Recorded_TV share directory on the attached usb drive, I find that it mirrors the now-current state of that folder as it appears in Windows on my desktop PC. The missing movies are not there but the three movies I added only yesterday are!!! It seems to me that something very funny is going on.

if you do a mirror backup that means rsync synchronizes the usb drive with the content of Recorded_TV.
So if there are only 3 files in Recorded_TV then rsync will remove all files on usb drive that are not present in Recorded_TV and keep only the 3 files. (<=> mirror content)

A backup allowing to restore Recorded_TV at different times, you need to use the incremental Backup.

It is why backup menu has this warning

(Warning: with a mirror backup all extra files and folders in destination are removed)

I am sorry but currently there is no way to restore your missing files

Hi Jocko

Thanks for responding so speedily.

Jocko wrote:

Fuddyduddy wrote:The last log for the Recorded TV job was 24 Feb 2016. I presume that means that that was the date on which that job was last run?

Yes that is

...if you do a mirror backup that means rsync synchronizes the usb drive with the content of Recorded_TV.

I can understand that, and of course you have made the correct inference:- upon checking I find that I did indeed set <Backup Options> to "Mirror Backup". God alone knows why :hammerhead

BUT, two comments:-
1) The first of your statements conflicts with the second. If CRON made the most recent backup as long as one week ago, how come three files I only added to that share two days ago are included while three or four others that were there a week ago are gone?
2) You haven't addressed the other question I asked. Putting aside my stupidity in having set up a mirror backup and thereby made the backup useless for restoring-from, how about the fact that those movie files vanished from my Recorded_TV share on my NS2 in the first place, and how do I guard against that happening again?

I continue to be totally nonplussed by this behaviour. If it can happen once, randomly, then presumably it can just as randomly happen again. This fundamentally undermines my trust in the fitness for purpose of either the fvdw firmware, or of my hardware (the NS2) or both. Are you able to offer any reassurances, or to suggest what can be done to prevent any repetition? So far as I'm aware I did nothing to cause it.

I've now run SMART's short self-test (since 'Help' for the long one warns it can take many hours, but doesn't say whether or not the NAS is out of action while the test is in progress) - on both the NS2's drive and the attached usb drive. It returned positive results on both.

Hi Fuddyduddy,

Fuddyduddy wrote:1) The first of your statements conflicts with the second. If CRON made the most recent backup as long as one week ago, how come three files I only added to that share two days ago are included while three or four others that were there a week ago are gone?

Yes this is not normal. An idea is that system time on your NAS was not update and then 24 February was not really 24 February.

Fuddyduddy wrote:2) You haven't addressed the other question I asked. Putting aside my stupidity in having set up a mirror backup and thereby made the backup useless for restoring-from, how about the fact that those movie files vanished from my Recorded_TV share on my NS2 in the first place, and how do I guard against that happening again?

No I got a way in my previous post : use the incremental backup. See the help page :

With this menu, three types of backup (remote or local backup) are possible :
· Mirror Backup
'Destination' folder is synchronized to be identical to 'Source' folder, and the files in the destination folder not present in the source folder are removed without backup.
· Incremental Backup
'Destination' folder is synchronized to be identical to 'Source' folder, the files previous version and the removed files are saved in a time-stamped folder)
· Restore
Same operation as 'Mirror Backup' but you can keep the extraneous files of destination folder and ignore files with a date newer than the source file.