u/takilamiyewhd

Had my first degraded array situation recently and honestly did not expect the rebuild process to feel this stressful.

Everything still technically works but the whole time it feels like you are one more drive issue away from losing everything. Especially with bigger drives now where rebuilds can take forever.

Before this I always felt like redundancy made things 'safe enough' but sitting there watching the rebuild progress for hours definitely changed that feeling for me.

Since last night my 2TB WD external HDD started disconnecting randomly and windows asked me to scan/repair it. I ran chkdsk without really thinking about it and now the drive is hardly showing up at all.

Looking back on older posts here and realizing that might have been a horrible idea. Did I do something to make recovery more difficult?

I used to think my NAS setup was 'safe enough' because I had redundancy, snapshots and multiple drives.

Then I had a small scare recently that made me realize how different 'redundancy' and 'backup' actually are.

Nothing catastrophic thankfully but it completely changed how I think about important data and single points of failure.

Now I am curious how other Synology users here approach this mentally.

Was there a time, mistake, hardware failure, deletion accident, rebuild problem, power failure, etc. that changed the way you back up forever?

Most people feel to only learn the importance of backups after one uncomfortable lesson.