Network storage inspires a particular kind of email — longer, more technical, and written by someone who did everything the manual said and got hurt anyway. Two genuine examples from the archive (identifying details removed), each answered the way the bench answers them now.
A corrupted photo library and drives failing in sequence — what a NAS actually protects you from.
“I keep my iPhoto library on a Synology DiskStation 413J so the whole family can reach the photos. After a power cut the library won’t open — iPhoto says it’s corrupted and offers to rebuild, but the rebuild hangs. The photos seem to be in there when I browse the folders, but thousands have odd names and the albums are gone. Have we lost the organisation of fifteen years?”
Today’s answer: probably not — but stop clicking ‘rebuild’. A photo library is two things living together: the image files, and a database of albums, edits and organisation. Power cuts hurt the database far more readily than the photos — especially over a network, where apps like iPhoto were never designed to live (interrupted writes to a library on a share are the classic corruption recipe). Repeated rebuild attempts rewrite that fragile database in place. The right order: copy the entire library folder untouched to local storage first, then repair the copy — where recovery can rebuild the database, or at worst re-associate fifteen years of photos by their internal dates. And going forward: photos on the NAS, yes; the live library a photo app writes to, no.
“My Synology started beeping about a degraded volume. I replaced the drive it flagged and during the rebuild a second drive started showing errors. Now the volume is ‘crashed’ and support says restore from backup — the NAS was the backup. Why would drives that were fine for years suddenly all fail together?”
Today’s answer: because they weren’t fine — they were identical: same model, same batch, bought the same day, spun up the same hours, worn the same amount. When one crosses the failure line, its twins are standing at it — and a rebuild is the hardest week of reading a drive ever does, which is why the second failure so often happens during one. From where you are: power it down, pull the disks labelled by bay, and send them — a crashed volume atop drives with errors is a recovery scenario the bench sees weekly, and usually a winnable one if no further rebuilds are attempted. The longer answer to ‘why together?’ has its own guide in this library.
NAS boxes concentrate risk while feeling like they diffuse it: one enclosure, drives that age as twins, apps writing databases over a network, and a redundancy light that reads as ‘backed up’. The letters’ shared lesson is the one worth framing: a NAS is a place data lives, not a place it’s safe — safety is a second copy somewhere the first copy’s disasters can’t reach.
If your DiskStation is beeping, degraded, or hosting a photo library that won’t open — stop before the rebuild, not after. The diagnostic is free, the quote is fixed in writing, and honest advice on 0131 202 0491 costs nothing at all.