Any way to NOT lose data when installing drives on NAS?

[Timothyq79]

Total novice here with this kind of thing.

Just purchased the QNAP TS-451+. All of these drives came out of my Windows 10 PC and will still be accessed by it. When trying to set up the drives it warns that I will lose all data... so of course I stopped. Is there any way to NOT lose my MANY tb of data? Seems a little ridiculous to me as I would imagine one of the major reasons to get a NAS to begin with is because one is running out of space (and thus, has lots of data!)

I can't seem to find a straight answer to what seems like what should be a pretty common question.

 

[popatim]

The Qnap , same for most NAS's, runs an embedded form of linux and has limited support for microsoft's disk formats. NTFS and FAT are "read only" from the USB port on the qnap.

The fast way is to restore data from your backups which, sadly, many people neglect to create.

You will need at least 1 more empty drive then what you have already.
- Install the empty drive and copy the contents of one of you drives to it. Verify all files copied correctly.
- Then install the drive you just copied from into the Qnap and let it format it. Copy your next drives' data to this newly formatted drive..
Repeat until all you drives' data has been moved to the qnap drives successfully. This will leave you with a drive that you can empty and keep in your pc or move to your Qnap. Your nas will have individual drives for you to configure/manage.

Since you were running low on space, you probably needed at least 1 more blank hdd anyways.

Also, If you were planning on some type of raid or redundancy. Do not begin this process. Let us know and lets see what we can come up with.

And lastly, Keep in mind that a backup is an extra copy of your data, not an only copy. You need to plan for when a harddrive fails and cannot be recovered.