Best way to recover Files and Folders data
I just bricked a NAS with a public share where I keep all my day-to-day working data plus installation data and doc for all software installed on my 4 computers. Luckily, I take a daily backup of the share, and I took an extra backup right before trying to update the firmware.
Now I get to recover to an older, slower, smaller NAS.
In the past when I've needed to recover a file I just opened the backup in File Explorer and copied the file. Works great for a file or two but File Explorer (or the ATI extension to File Explorer) says I've got 5 hours 45 minutes remaining in copying all the data ... and it's said that for the past hour. Oh, no, I'm wrong. It suddenly jumped to 20 hours. I know these estimates are garbage, but it makes me wonder if I'm going at this wrong.
The full backup takes a bit over an hour. Assuming the transfer rate of the old NAS is half that of the faster one, would I be better to do a Recover in ATI? I've never tried a Files and Folders recovery and really don't know anything about it.
Steve Smith wrote:Patrick, does your older, slower, smaller NAS have any options to allow you to connect it directly to your computer via USB, as if so, that might provide a faster recovery option than going across your network?
Nope. Ethernet only. But I have now done a recovery so I can approach this topic with a bit less panic.
I posted the question after my first puzzling attempt at recovery. I first tried doing an ATI recovery to the public share on the old NAS. ATI prompted me for credentials. Odd for recovery of a public share to another public share. I have no idea what I gave - possibly the Admin credentials of the destination NAS. ATI gave me a message about inappropriate permissions but let me ignore the problem. The recovery seemed to go ahead, but I worried that I was giving all the recovered files and folders inappropriate permissions so I canceled it.
At that point I decided to do the File Explorer copy. I commented on the time estimates in my original post.
I then decided to try another ATI recovery - this time to a USB-attached external drive - and let it run at the same time as the File Explorer copy ... undoubtedly slowing down both processes, but I was going to bed so that didn't matter much. Surprisingly, this attempt also prompted me for credentials. The credentials being asked for must have the credentials used for the backup ... I guess. But since this was the backup of a public share there were no credentials. Luckily, ATI let me cancel the request for credentials and went ahead with the recovery. Recovery took just a bit longer than the original backup - much faster than the File Explorer method. (I have no idea how log that took. I went to bed.)
In the morning I had a pulic share with the recovered data and a copy on an external drive. I have temporarily renamed the old NAS with the DNS name of the bricked NAS and now all my computers have access to the data with no changes needed.
I am in the process of doing a "factory reset" of the (perhaps not) bricked NAS. This process supposedly resets everything to factory settings and scrubs data from the disk. Unfortunately, that scrubbing can take up to several days according to reports on the web. I can detect no disk activity so I suspect the device is truly unusable, but I won't know for a couple days.
I've decided I should document what I learned a couple days ago.
Option 1:
Doing the copy from the backup file using File Explorer resulted in folder's creation date replaced with the date of the copy.
Option 2:
Recovering to an external drive retained the original timestamps. Using Robocopy with /DCOPY:T copied the data to the "new" NAS with those timestamps. However, Robocopy seemed a bit slow.
Option 3:
Recovering directly to the NAS also retained the timestamps, of course. I had to manually select all of the top level files and folder to recover. I don't remember having to do that when I recovered to the external drive (and it was cumbersome enough that I think I would have remembered).
There were several problems with this option.
- I got error message "E00170027: Failed to modify permissions.". I told ATI to ignore this for all folders and files. If the recovery was unusable I could perform option 2 again.
- ATI required the infamous computer restart at the completion of the recovery! I don't think there was anything in the recovered files or folders that ATI could have construed as a system file, but it did two automatic restarts. One into Linux (I assume) and another back into Windows.
Maybe ATI always does this when a recovery in place is initiated from Windows. In any case, it's enough to keep me from ever using this option again. When I'm brave enough I will try this on ATI 2020 to see if it acts the same.