It happened to me….
A crash off all my disks in a Synology DS 412+. Yeah….. For sometime my disks reported problems… but I thought.. just wait a few months more… then I can buy new disks…
But in the end…. the disks crashed all together.
I know what your first response is…. did you make backups ??
Answer: Yes. Yes I did.
How to restore
I used synology Hyper backup to make backups off my photos, documents and music folder to an external USB drive. And I new that these backups where very recent.
But to access this data I had to restore it and needed a working Synology DSM. My options were:
- buy at least 2 new disks and re-install the DS 412+
- Find a friend with a DSM and use his/her DSM to restore my data and to move it into a cloud storage
- Looking into running DSM virtual
I choose option 3. Why ?
Well…. I was interested if it could be done.
Technicaly it could be possible. I had VMware workstation running on my laptop and new about xpenology. After some searching on the internet I found this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8YUq2QGhks
So it could be done….
Running DSM virtual
After some experiments I got it working, running DSM 6.x in a VM under VMware workstation 12.
I created a virtual DSM according to others blogs. Added a disk (VMDK) 200 GB in size. (large enough to restore a backup-set).
Then I started the DSM, did the usual configuration. Made a no-raid raid config with one disk. Created the volume in the newly created raid set. installed some DSM apps (at least the hyper-backup application).
And restored a backup from my external USB drive.
Moving data in to the cloud
Yes !!!!…. I had found a way to acces my data… but where should I store it ?
I used the Cloud sync app to sync the restored data to a cloud storage provider. If the provider supports webdav then it is possible to sync your local data to it. I needed to keep this running for several days due to the upload bandwith of my internet provider. but in the end I had my data accesible again.
xpenology and virtualization saved the day.
vB(art)log 