Hello recently i was locked out of my NAS after moving and wasn’t able to access the web dashboard from my computer. I researched a bunch a found out a guide for soft reset as a fix via perplexity. What it did not mention was the volume lock which i had store the keys on the Nas itself as i was under the impression i wouldnt have to use it anytime soon , also the guide never mentioned the use of keys for a potential volume lock. Long story short i did the soft reset and now i cannot access thousands of important files both business and personal. I reached out to Synology but no real help as i was told the key was the only way to unlock the volume. I would appreciate it if someone could help me figure out a way to fix this issue as my entire business and personal files are store in the NAS . For context it is a RS1221+ rack mount NAS i have had for about a year now.
I understand you are in a precarious situation with an encrypted volume without the key.
First, some theory, briefly. When you create an encrypted volume, you have been explicitly warned about storing the recovery key downloaded to your computer. You need this key if the encryption key, stored on the NAS in the key vault, is lost. When do you lose the key? When you reset the pin on the NAS. You need the recovery key but do not have it because the pin reset wiped the key vault.
The only way to get your data is from a backup. The encryption of a volume does not affect the backup. You can delete and recreate the volume and restore the backup. There is no way to decrypt the volume without the recovery key. If that were possible, volume encryption would not make any sense, would it?
I have seen similar reports in user forums, and I am sorry to hear about it.
Thank you for you thoughtful response , i really appreciate it ! First off how do i go about restoring the backup? i did take snapshots following an initial install guide from space-ex, id love if you could link a video explaining how to restore a backup from a snapshot etc. Thank you !
Welcome to AI. Garbage in > Garbage out.
When setting an encrypted volume, this warning appears…
Important: If you reset DSM, the Encryption Key Vault will be erased and disabled, resulting in your encrypted volumes becoming locked. To regain access to these volumes, you will need to re-enable the vault and use the respective recovery key to unlock each encrypted volume.
Since you made no provision for key recovery, it is essential that your NAS backup is also off-NAS. As snapshots can only be replicated to a Synology NAS, I would infer you have a second NAS. If not, snapshot recovery is not possible.
Since this data was indispensable to you, presumably you kept a regularly updated backup on an external drive, or in the cloud.
Let us know where that backup resides and how it was taken, and we’ll talk about restoration.
Did you replicate these snapshots to another NAS? Or are there only local snapshots? In other words, could you tell us more about the replication topology?
No sadly i did not. How ever i did setup portion of the NAS as backup. For context i have 46TB of which 10TB is used for backup and snapshots from the raid configuration and 36TB for active File sharing
Unfortunately I did not , i set the system up quickly to focus on work as i travel alot for work hence i did not set it up properly.
If that is a backup to another volume that is not encrypted, there is a chance to restore that data.
Unfortunately backups on the same NAS are not backups. Backups are only off-NAS. Hard lessons to learn. Since you’ve already contacted Synology, I suspect their answer is correct.
Hello sorry for the late reply as im typically offline on the weekends. I believe so but i do not have access to any of the, not a good sigh ;(
yea, true. I guess thats what i get for a lazy setup. Synology themselves say there is nothing much they can do in that situation