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Can I clone a disc taken from Raid5 NAS drive?

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Is it possible to clone a disc taken from  4 disc Raid 5 NAS?

My Synology NAS box died the other day and for reasons various, I don't have a backup.

I have a replacement NAS of the same type, and I'm led to believe I might be able to just put the existing drives in the new box and it will sort itself out. However, to be on the safe side, I was wondering if it was possible to take each disc from NAS and clone it to a new drive of exactly the same type? This would be done using a Windows 7 PC with both and source and destination drives being additional drives on the PC.

I have read various notes, but am not sure if this is possible. I am currently on the Acronis trial, but need to purchase the full product to get access to the clone facility, so don't want to buy it if I can't use it.

TIA

Nigel

 

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Nigel, welcome to these public User Forums.

You haven't mentioned what size the disks from your failed Synology NAS are or what file system these are using?

Typically Synology NAS disks use either the Linux EXT4 or BTRFS file systems, of which Acronis only currently support EXT4 (without needing to switch to doing a sector-by-sector mode of operation).

You may be best advised to ask this question in the Synology forums too, to see how other users have dealt with any similar scenarios. I have only been involved in helping with a single failed disk in a Synology NAS using their hybrid SHR RAID array for a 2 disk system, where it was a case of just replacing the failed disk and letting the array rebuild itself.

One alternative option would be to consider a disk dock with 2 drive slots that support doing a hardware clone from the source to target slots.  The one key requirement of this method is that the target disk is of equal or greater size than the source drive.  The cost of a cloning dock is likely to be less than the cost for purchasing ATI 2021.

Thanks for your reply, Steve. The drives are 3TB and the new blank drives I've got, are exactly the same model and size as the originals. I'm not sure which file system, but I suspect Btrfs, as I think that is the default and I don't remember changing from the defaults when I set up the DS415. I have asked in the Synolgy forum and the one reply there was to just put the drives in the replacement unit, however the Synolgy instructions don't seem to entirely agree with this, which is why I wanted to try cloning to give me a fallback. There also may be an issue with my HP Z400 workstation not supporting 3Tb drives, but that may only apply to bootable drives.

As it happens, I have a 2 drive docking station arriving on Monday, so this may be the easiest way forward.