I found out the hard way that USB Copy fails in several repects if a USB drive happens to be sleeping.
After being disappointed with the performance of the in-built RSync server, I tried to use USB Copy to make scheduled backups from the internal NAS to external storage.
All appeared to go well when I setup and tested the USB Copy jobs as one-off runs. The reason this went well was because the external storage drives were 'awake' and USB Copy worked as expected. The jobs were then scheduled to run before the daily NAS shutdown and should have had nothing to copy as I'd completed a manual backup the same day.
However, on checking the logs the following morning, all the jobs started but never finished.
Information Task backup_videos has started 2021-01-24 00:30:01
Information Task backup_timeshift has started 2021-01-24 00:10:00
Information Task backup_dev_library has started 2021-01-24 00:08:00
Information Task backup_music has started 2021-01-24 00:00:00
Looking at the USB Copy jobs in the UI, all were marked as "USB drive has been removed"
The destination external drive now showed up as unmounted. Running 'mount' confirmed this.
Gripe #1: there appears to be no way to manually mount an external drive via the UI.
Manually mounting the drive failed:
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mount -t ext4 /dev/sdh1 /mnt/usb/usbshare2
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdh1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
Running fdisk and lsblk confirmed the external drive was responding so it appeared to be a ext4 journal issue.
Gripe #2: Why doesn't the NAS perform a sync before shutdown and an optional disk check on startup? There is a UI to specify a scheduled restart, why not have an option to force an optional disk check in cases like this.
I did manage to recover the ext4 journal by manually running:
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fsck -y /dev/sdh1
For those of you using USB Copy, I'd suggest you run a script before any scheduled copy to wake up the drive(s) before the USB Copy occurs. This will save you a lot of grief.
I've not tested to see if the Rsync server can also handle sleeping external drives so I'd run the wakey wakey script just in case.
Can you confirm if any/all of these issues have been fixed in TOS 4.2.08?
i.
HW
TM F4-210, 2GB
RAID5: 4x X400 4TB
Ext USB 3.0: Icy Box IB-3664SU3, 3x N300 8TB
SW
TOS: 4.1.27-2006291655
USB Copy: 1.5.6