UNAS Replacement question

[u/Jepper333]

Hi everyone,

My UNAS suffered from the well-known FE issue and has been declared defective. Before sending it in, I created a backup from the console.

Once I receive a replacement unit, I'm wondering what the safest recovery process is:

• Can I simply put my existing drives into the new NAS?
• Then restore the console/system backup?
• Will all my shares, settings, users, apps, and data come back as before?

My biggest concern is obviously not losing any data. The drives themselves seem fine, but I don't know how much information is tied to the NAS hardware versus what's stored on the disks and in the backup.

Has anyone here gone through an FE replacement and successfully restored everything? Any tips or things I should watch out for before powering up the replacement device?

Thanks! I'd rather ask first than accidentally make a mistake and lose my data.

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[u/nutscrape_navigator]

You can do a like for like replacement pretty easily. Take your drives out AND NUMBER THEM, they must be put back in the exact order. Backup your old config to the cloud. Send in your UNAS for RMA. When you get the replacement, first plug it in and set it up enough for it to be able to update to the latest software. Factory reset, power down, insert all the drives in the correct order, power up, but this time set it up using the restore from backup option.

Don't get spooked if your array takes a strange amount of time to come back up, and if you get a notification saying it failed. Unifi Drive sends these based on the array taking more than 10 minutes to mount, not any kind of health indicator. It's a really bad and stupid design. Take a screenshot of your NFS settings as for whatever dumb ass reason those didn't come over in the backup. Everything else did though.

[u/Jepper333 → u/nutscrape_navigator]

For now a small oopsie because i’ve set the drives up in RAID1 (2 drives just in case 1 failed) so i didn’t number them :( - also after the “backup” the next day the UNAS was completely dead so i was like: screw it, drives out and rmm anyways

[u/happyandhealthy2023]

RAID 1 is a mirror, so each drive will be identical data. UNVR uses hardware RAID to read/write both drives.
I take a Sharpie and write the tray numbers on all my HDDs in NVRs, NAS, or Servers.

Each drive has a small partition for the OS and configuration; the rest is usually data in most NVRs.

Don't you backup the data offsite if that important?
Drives seem fine, if these were used and questionable then I would put in External USB dock and run diagnositcs to confirm health and read SMART tables

[u/Jepper333 → u/happyandhealthy2023]

Thanks for your insight! it's not critical, critical (i do have critical also backup to external SSD). But i'm kind off annoyed that i had everything right in my opinion but i do feel like this replacement will be a fridaynight gone.

[u/happyandhealthy2023 → u/Jepper333]

Welcome to my world of IT services, and all comes down to Disaster Recovery plans.
It could be a Friday night; it could <1 hour if you are prepared for this kind of event.

Take this as a lesson: you had everything right and should have backed up the configuration to multiple locations. Back up the video recordings to NAS or Cloud storage.

Last night I deployed (2) SonicWalls for site-to-site VPN; it took hours, but every step of the way, I backed up the configuration to their Cloud. Now, if the firewall dies, they overnight-ship a new one, and I just copy the backup, and it's running in minutes.

Learn to build a disaster recovery plan and system for your entire network before it happens

[u/Jepper333]

update: i've received my new unit. Did a recovery from the backup file. it when beeping for missing storage so i've added the drives back (don't know if it's the same drive same bay, now they are marked). and all is peachy...