Thecus Support Destroyed My Business

[sweetspud]

My N5200 was experiencing reduced performance. I contacted Thecus support in the US (two seperate times). The second time, after a conversation, Thecus determined that the problem was related to remaining capacity. As I had one remaining open bay, I was counseled to Migrate from four drives to five drives. I asked for very specific and detailed directions in addition to Thecus-approved drives to use for this Migration. I followed this direction PRECISELY. The Migration took place over a few days and went from 0 to 100% without a problem until the very end. At 100%, the NAS sounded the alarm and would not boot. After weeks of dialogue with Thecus Support and numerous remote attempts by Thecus Taiwan, it was determined that my RAID5 was not recoverable by Thecus. Thecus support indicated after this extensive evaluation and recovery attempt that the original problem was not a capacity issue but, rather a corruption issue that should have been corrected before any attempt to Migrate to the fifth drive. It goes without saying that I inquired at to why this issue was not identified BEFORE THEY suggested the Migrate process. No clear response was offered. Thecus Support directed me to a third party recovery company. I am now facing a 8 to 15 THOUSAND dollar recovery process!!!

This was all due to the flawed direction from Thecus Support. I have extensive and detailed records of every step of this failed process.

I am a professional digital photographer. Thecus Support, without exaggeration, has literally destroyed my 25 year business.

Something to consider as a potential customer.

[Moi]

Redundancy does not equal backup.
At the end of the day, you only have yourself to blame.

There endeth the lesson.

[gideon007]

yes, even though that lesson is not nice to learn.
Computer magazines repeat the mantra that you need a backup, GOOD computer magazines will tell you that to store things on a RAID is not the same as having a backup. You can use a RAID as backup and that is mostly more secure than just storing stuff on a single hard drive but using a RAID as storage AND backup is foolish.

That said, I'm sorry and I hope you can recover from this.

[robinio]

I lost my RAID on N5200. Nothing fishy was found postmortem except abnormal shutdown. Of course, this wasn't visible in system logs. This simply sucks. How can I rely on Thecus again?

Backup or no backup, I agree with sweetput. Thecus is not cheapest out there and every nas should be capable to digest few (probably) well choosen commands from Thecus support. I have Thecus to backup expensier IBM storage. But even for that...

I don't want it to throw it away (yet), so I will try beta firmware. Now when I see, that old models have no new firmware support there are no many options for Thecus out there