Rhenen, 6 December 2011

Sir,

I have several questions on the Freecom Silverstore NAS / Tonido

1. I had serious problems to configure my first Hard Disk. At the time I received this NAS, I only had a relatively small Hard Disk (120 GB). After some experimentation, the only way that was successful was to start the Recovery Procedure. This was successful. (Later I learned that my problem may have been caused by the multiple partitions on this drive, which were all removed - including their contents - after the recovery procedure).
After I purchased two new identical Hard Disks (2 TB each), I placed one of them next the first (small one) as a second disk. Unfortunately, I was not able to get this second disk in operation. The second disk was reported as foreign!.
Therefore I removed the small hard drive and tried to get the second hard disk (2 TB) installed by itself. In this case again I was only successful after a Recovery Procedure.

Now the hard disk drive works fine, but when I shut down the NAS, replace the 2 TB by the previous 120 GB disk and start up, all features seem to work, but I cannot approach the driver now by http://xxxxx.freecomnas.com (xxxxx-my name). I get the following error:

Tonido Service Unavailable The requested Tonido User Website is not currently available.

(When I put the large 2 TB disk back again, no problem)

My questions:
1. What can I do to solve this problem? (is there a file on the large disk that I have to put on the smaller hard disk)?
2. Related: how can I see (copy) the files on the smaller hard disk, when this disk in not inside of the NAS. I have attached this 120GB disk to a computer. Under Windows, contents of this disk cannot be seen. Also after starting up this computer with a Linux Live disk (either Knoppix or Ubuntu or a x-86 system), I cannot see the contents.
Could you provide me with a method (not using the NAS) to see this contents so that I can copy the contents to a different location?

regards,
Fred Hoorn

Please note that we can only help with Tonido part of your FreecomNAS. for general NAS questions, please contact Freecom Technical support.

The Tonido account (for xxxx.freecomnas.com) you created is stored on the HDD. If you remove the HDD, the account is no longer available, you have to create a different account or do account recovery so that the account is stored on the new disk. But note that if you do account recovery, if you put back the original disk the account will not work anymore from the original disk.

Thanks very much for your fast answer. As you suggested I have contacted Freecom as well.

For the Tonido part I got somewhat confused:
1. I would have expected that with account recovery the same account works on both hard disks. If not, I consider this awkward?
2. Question: what should I do to keep the same account but want to change hard disks?

regards,
fred

It won't be possible. Sorry, but I don't understand why you want to keep switching hard disks.

Thanks again for answering.

I was under the impression that hot swap was possible, but as I learned I was wrong.
Most NASses have easy access to hard disks, including the Freecom Silverstore.
When the account information is written to the hard disk, I would find in quite logical that if you recover the same account, the same account is written to another (new) hard disk. I would think it would be an improvement if you would change the software accordingly.
If that would be difficult (I am not a programmer since some Quick Basic), why would it not be possible to pick up the information from the first disk and copy it to the second new one.

Your question on "why I would need changing hard disks" is a good and interesting question. At present, I now have two hard disks filled with information. Only one (the large new one) can be used (read: can be approached from the internet). It would be a lot easier for me when I could exchange them without any limitations. In fact, it would be even more attractive, when I could put the first (small) disk back next to the large one and if I could then access both without additional efforts (2 TB + 120 GB= 2.12 TB).

regard,
fred

Is it correct to summarize that with 1 single FreecomNAS account, you can only use 1 single HDD at a time, yet through account recovery you can always change to another drive (yet the content of any new drive will be erased during the account recovery process)?

Yes. Because the contents of the account are stored in the hard drive, if you swap HDD, you will lose the account unless you do account recovery or create a different account.

Thx for quick confirm!

I do get why users of the Freecom NAS have questions about swapping HDDs, as easy swapping of HDD is actually promoted as a key feature by Freecom!

http://www.freecom.com/Products/External-Hard-Drives/Network-Hard-Drives/SilverStore2

Would hope that Freecom (icw Tonido) upgrade the firmware so that the Tonido account data can be transferred between Hdds without erasing the drive's data. (why not store it in NAS ROM?)