IT ISSUE · SERVERS AND INFRASTRUCTURE
NAS unavailable
Bought to solve one problem and quietly carrying three, which is why the first question is what it held.A network drive is usually bought to solve one problem and quietly ends up carrying several. By the time it stops responding it is often holding shared files, somebody's backup target, and a copy of something nobody else has, which is why the first question is what it was doing rather than how to restart it.
What you may notice
- The shares are unreachable from every computer.
- A drive or fault light is showing on the unit.
- It responds to its web interface but not to file access.
- Only some shares are missing.
- Backups pointing at it have started failing.
Check the unit, then ask what depended on it
We check whether the unit is running, reachable and healthy, the state of its disks, and whether the shares, permissions or accounts have changed.
Then the harder conversation. A NAS with a failed disk and no second copy isn't a storage problem, it is a question about what only existed here. If it was also the destination for backups, then the backup and the thing being backed up were in the same box, and that arrangement has been protecting less than it appeared to. Better to establish that now than at the point of needing it.