I have been pretty quiet since my last posts here about problems, but in the last week I’ve had major issues again (I am now on 3.0.0.4.386_43181) and it has been very frustrating.
I think I might have found a cause though, which is going to be quite annoying if proven. I’ve submitted a report and 6 hours of logging to Asus, but I am not entirely sure they’ll spot the issue.
Basically, a week or two ago I connected a USB HDD to the XT8 router, and set it up as a media player and TimeMachine for backing up both a MacBook Pro and Mac Mini. All seemed to work very well, and I was very impressed, but then I noticed that while the TimeMachine backups were enabled, the router was reporting that the HDD was corrupt and could not fix the problem after 3 attempts.
It eventually showed the drive as unmounted, and at this point the TimeMachine backups (unsurprisingly) stopped working too.
I had to remove the HDD to try and repair it, without success, and therefore had to format it – losing all the data (I do use TimeMachine on a local drive, this was really about dual redundancy, and the media is also stored elsewhere). Nevertheless, it was a pain.
Now, at some point during this (what I thought was an isolated problem) the router had in fact rebooted a few times, knocking out the AI Mesh node and causing problems to the point that when I was out, my wife had to turn off the node entirely as it was causing too many issues with her laptop and work (screen sharing) connection.
With the HDD removed, the problem went away so I never got around to doing a full reset and starting over (something I may one day do, but it’s also a pain). The node has been connected without fail and all was good.
Then on Friday, I decided to hook up a different HDD to the XT8 and set it all up again, and within 24 hours the router crashed again, and it was at this point that I noticed this HDD was now showing as corrupt and the exact same issues as before.
That HDD is now removed and I’ve given up on using it for TimeMachine backups.
What I’ve got now is a 32GB flash drive connected just for a handful of films I can copy over to watch on my TV – and I’m going to monitor the situation to see if this gets corrupted. If it doesn’t, I’ll probably conclude that it is while doing a TimeMachine backup that the router is crashing, corrupting the data on the HDD and also messing up the network.
Consider this a word of warning for anyone else who might potentially use a HDD for storing data not kept elsewhere – you may well lose it!
You need to login in order to vote