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Problem with a QNap TS-212P :(

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LeKeiser

Senior Member
Hello,

I own a Qnap TS-212P with 2 hard disks configured as a Raid1.
I use it to store my music, all my CDs.
The problem is that this NAS decided to sometimes double my songs. I guess when I had an electrical shutdown, some of the songs appear twice or three times. Like "song (2)" and/or "song (3)"
So I have to go inside all the directories and delete the doubles or triples...

And yesterday I was copying some albums, some with special characters in their name but nothing unusual. Like Mötorhead or Mötley Crüe. And my WiFi card failed. When the network was back, the names of the artists were all wrong. The name of the directories AND the name of ALL the songs. I didn't want to check the rest of the directories, I was really pissed off then :O

I have 2 other NAS : Western Digital and DLink. They both works perfectly. They never doubled or trippled my files. Never changed the names of my files.

Right now, I really dislike QNap NASes. I am still thinking of getting another Western NAS, to replace it. But I would prefer to find a solution, if there is one of course.

Oh, I have removed all the programs running on the QNAP. I just want it to use it as a Raid1 peripheral.

Thank you for your comments :)
 
Some of the issues do not seem (at least to me) to really be QNAP issues. Ending up with partial files and duplicate names when copying fails due to your wifi failure for example is actually a good thing showing that the file system in your NAS is actually trying to help you and potentially saving valuable data.

However, if I were you, I would certainly run some diagnostics or those drives and at least reformat them one at a time so that you can rebuild the mirror without data loss.

Personally, I've had my QNAP's longer, but don't find them any more or any less reliable than my DLinks or WD units.
 
Hello,
Thing is, I wasn't copying anything when my WiFi got interrupted. I was just making a list of files I wanted to copy. And the names being changed weren't even the directory I was looking at.
Also, the duplicate names happened after an electrical shutdown, and I wasn't using the NAS at all, I wasn't even on my computer. Might have been trying to save the data, but my other 2 NAS at least didn't do that.
I really disapointed with this NAS. All I wanted was to have 2 disks in Raid1, and that's it. Never wanted the NAS to take over the data in any way.
I run a diagnostic every week. Disks are fine. I don't want to format them again, I have quite a bit of data there, and the transfer is not that fast.
 
Is it possible that there is a virus on that NAS? You mention that you have disabled all the programs on it...
 
And yesterday I was copying some albums, some with special characters in their name but nothing unusual. Like Mötorhead or Mötley Crüe. And my WiFi card failed.
Thing is, I wasn't copying anything when my WiFi got interrupted.
I only go by what you post ;)

Still sounds like the NAS was doing you a favour and recovering data for you. Whether it was a copy in progress (which you say it wasn't now), a power shutdown (unclean), a random bad sector on the drive or a thousand other things, the system was trying to save your data and thus created a duplicate file.

More than likely this has nothing to do with the NAS manufacturer, but is the underlying O/S (i.e. Linux) self-correcting.

Not that any of this really matters, no matter what brand you go with (and my point I guess is that IMO QNAP is no better or worse than the other brands you name) you will potentially have the same or similar issues as sh!t happens :) Drives fail, hardware fails, networks fail,...

DO NOT COUNT ON RAID TO BE A BACKUP. Anything that is important to you should be copied elsewhere.

(FWIW - my point about formatting would not necessitate you to copy everything off, format, then copy back. You should be able to break the mirror, format one drive, remirror, break the mirror, format the other drive, then remirror. But, moot anyway since you ran diagnostics.)

Assuming the drives have S.M.A.R.T. capabilities (or similar) is there any indication of failure in the detailed analysis?

(IMO symptoms don't "look" like typical virus behaviour, but never hurts to check) :)
 
Who bothers to write a virus, period?
 
I never heard of a virus on a NAS.
Although there are indeed virus' that target and "live" on NAS units, what is more common is that infected files get copied to/from the NAS and it is really your computer (or other infected system) that is simply causing problems by infecting anything they can whether local or remote via samba (or other sharing).

A NAS is really just a dedicated PC specifically geared to perform NAS-like functions. Most brands are the equivalent to a Linux PC. Some are proprietary, but not many these days.

https://www.quora.com/What-can-a-vi...ing-when-its-transferred-to-a-device-computer
 
I only go by what you post ;)

Still sounds like the NAS was doing you a favour and recovering data for you. Whether it was a copy in progress (which you say it wasn't now), a power shutdown (unclean), a random bad sector on the drive or a thousand other things, the system was trying to save your data and thus created a duplicate file.

More than likely this has nothing to do with the NAS manufacturer, but is the underlying O/S (i.e. Linux) self-correcting.

Not that any of this really matters, no matter what brand you go with (and my point I guess is that IMO QNAP is no better or worse than the other brands you name) you will potentially have the same or similar issues as sh!t happens :) Drives fail, hardware fails, networks fail,...

DO NOT COUNT ON RAID TO BE A BACKUP. Anything that is important to you should be copied elsewhere.

(FWIW - my point about formatting would not necessitate you to copy everything off, format, then copy back. You should be able to break the mirror, format one drive, remirror, break the mirror, format the other drive, then remirror. But, moot anyway since you ran diagnostics.)

Assuming the drives have S.M.A.R.T. capabilities (or similar) is there any indication of failure in the detailed analysis?

(IMO symptoms don't "look" like typical virus behaviour, but never hurts to check) :)

Mmmh... Still it's weird. This is the only NAS that did duplicate the files. The two others, Raid1 too, running Linux of course, well they did shutdown hard but when they came back online, nothing was changed.
This NAS not only duplicates some of the files, not all of them but it also changes their names. Mötorhead is now GONE!!!! So now it's way worse than I thought! My directories and my files are totally gone! I just wanted to give you an example of the new names and they are gone!!
Why??? The NAS and its OS should never be able to delete directories/files like that! What's the point?? I mean, if you can't trust it to keep your data safe and as it is, then what gives???
I'm getting another brand! Tired of this one! Can't be trusted at all!
 
Sure sounds like a virus.

No QNAP NAS or otherwise I've ever used has done anything remotely similar to this.
 
My directories and my files are totally gone! Why???
If there was corruption (for the many reasons already presented to you) then, again, the operating system was trying to recover what it could. I've seen this 1000x in my 40 years in this business. I really don't suspect a virus, but the effect is not dissimilar. My vote, if I get one, is still a flakey HDD. *I* would pull the drives and run diagnostics on my PC.

Did you check the diagnostic logs? What brand, model HDD? How old?
 
No QNAP NAS or otherwise I've ever used has done anything remotely similar to this.
I've had similar experience. Nothing to do with the NAS itself (D-Link in my case) but was a HDD issue. *EXACT* same symptoms (files renamed or missing completely)

@LeKeiser - Depending on "how" the HDD *may* be failing, it could even be the raid/mirroring function that is making files appear with duplicate names or removing files that are corrupt. This is what raid does. Raid is *NOT* a backup.

See if you have a "lost+found" directory at the root :) I bet you do.
 
I don't see how a virus could be the source of the problem. I'm running my computers with Win10, they all have an AV running and some run MalwareByte just in case. I don't download excecutables, nor do I download games. Trust me, I've been a geek since I owned an Oric 1, so when I say it's not a virus problem, it's not a virus problem.
The names of the files and of the directories had accents. Mötorhead, Mötley Crüe, and I can see that Noir Désir is also gone. Well, gone if I check under windows. The directories are not there visually. If I check on the NAS itself, using the FileStation, then they are... there :

But as you can see, the accents have been replaced by special characters. And I cannot open the directories anymore. I get an error, File/Folder doesn't exist.
So I guess the OS just messed up again with the database and can't locate correctly the directories and the files.

Again, I own 2 different brand of NAS, and none of them ever did that to me.
Also, I run an intensive smardisk check every week, and the results are always good. Nothing wrong with the disks.

EDIT : I logged on the NAS and well, I guess there is nothing I can do. Directories are still there, but there is no way I can change the names, the OS doesn't allow me to :(
 
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Are you running the media server/player on the NAS? Maybe is simply doesn't support the codepage for "special" characters. You could rename them. It is just about 100% "something" (i.e. media player most likely) that is the source of your issue. Again, nothing specific to QNAP.
 
Nope, I'm not running anything at all on this NAS. I suspected that before the media server was the cause of the problem so I uninstalled it. There is absolutly nothing running on the NAS
I managed to get into the Mötorhead directory and copy the content to another directory. I logged on using SSH, then a simple "cd M?torhead" was enough. But I cannot enter a faulty directory if it has 2 names and a space, like Mötley Crüe or "Noir Désir". I tried "cd 'Noir D?sir' or cd "Noir D?sir" or cd 'Noir D*sir" but the directory doesn't exist. Yet I can still see it.

EDIT : well I did manage to get inside those directories and copy everything that was still in there to folders I created without those accents. Took some SSH and efforts, but it's done.
Still, what happened is not acceptable. I'm used to Linux. I'm not an expert like some, but I've been running Sheevaplug servers at home for a long time, Debian. Never had a problem like that with my data. And trust me, those servers are running quite a few programs, and if I had a problem with the namings, I'd have known.
Nope, this is the only system I've had problems with. Duplicate names (like "Names (2)" and "Names (3)" ) and now for no reason at all but a loss of network while surfing between directories, a change of directory names.
Out of curiosity, I'll check on what Linux the QNAP is working but right now, I'm pissed off at this NAS!

This thread is not closed yet, but thanx for your comments :)

EDIT 2 : I've launched a check on both disk. It's taking some time, 12% only after an hour. I'll have the result in the morning and I'll post it here :)
 
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For future reference, one "trick" to get into directories is to use the TAB key. For example if you type:
cd Noir D|<tab>
it should autofill the rest of the name (Unless there is more than one matching names - then it displays the remaining options).
 
For future reference, one "trick" to get into directories is to use the TAB key. For example if you type:
cd Noir D|<tab>
it should autofill the rest of the name (Unless there is more than one matching names - then it displays the remaining options).
I know that :)
But this can't work if it's a special character, like the one in my screenshot.
What you do is use the ? symbol to replace the character. And enter the rest on the keyboard.
 
As mentioned before this looks like a common codepage/locale problem.

For example here my terminal session has a locale of UTF-8 and my terminal emulator is also using UTF-8.
Untitled.png


If I change the emulator to use code page 437 it looks like this:
Untitled2.png


In either case to change to the Mötley Crüe directory I would type M<tab> to get this:
Untitled3.png

followed by l<tab> to get this:
Untitled4.png


Obviously this technique can't be used if there are different mis-displayed characters in the same position in the filename like this:
Untitled5.png

in which case the solution is to correct the mismatch between the locales/codepages so that you can enter the characters from the keyboard.
 
I don't know your NAS but do you by chance have write caching running without a UPS? This is a no no. When power goes out it corrupts. Set write caching to write through. It is slower but much safer. Or use a UPS for your NAS. The same thing holds for Windows.
 
But if it was a codepage/locale problem, why did it do that on only 3 folders that weren't even opened nor used.
I have other folders with accents, like Téléphone, Queensrÿche, ... and they kept the name, I can open them from Windows or from the FileStation, the accents don't block anything.
I guess you use Putty to log on the NAS? So the codepage/locale shouldn't be a problem at all. Never encountered a problem with Putty, only with the locale of the OS. I'll have to check on the QNAP configuration, but I'm not sure I won't mess it up more if I try to change it...
 
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