Beware of data corruption on old Synology DSM versions
Just a quick hint when you experience corrupted data on your Synology NAS: make sure to use the newest DSM version available.
By „corrupt data“, I mean one or more of the following (rather easy to spot on image files):
- Files of length zero (0 bytes) after copying to the Synology NAS
- Incomplete copies (i.e. JPGs with only half of the image data present)
- Corrupt data formats (i.e. Finder doesn’t show a preview or thumbnail of the file)
I just noticed this on my Lightroom archive (which sits on my NAS), and I could reproduce it consistently when copying a directory with about two hundred JPGs from my Mac to a network share on the NAS using either AFP or SMB – some of the files just appeared with a size of 0 bytes. Also, when importing images into my Lightroom archive (which is done via NFS), the import got stuck halfway and only showed about a third of the images imported.
I first suspected my recent upgrade to OS X Mavericks (10.9), but a fresh install with Snow Leopard (10.8) showed exactly the same. My wife’s Macbook Pro (also on 10.8) didn’t do any better, whereas my Windows 7 box had no trouble at all (and was almost twice as fast, but that’s another story).
It turned out that my Synology was still running DSM 4.3-3211, and an upgrade to the newest version (4.3-3827) did in fact fix the issue. So, three things to learn here:
- Check the integrity of your file archives regardless of where they are stored (external disk, NAS, cloud backup, …)
- Do. Regular. Backups. (But make sure not to overwrite perfectly fine backups with broken data…)
- Do. Regular. Updates.
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