Symptom
You log into your NAS and the system reports normal operation:
- All disks show healthy
- Volumes appear online
- No critical alerts are displayed
Yet your shared folders are empty.
User data is not visible. Directory structures may exist, but files are missing.
This condition is not a permissions issue and is rarely a simple UI glitch.
What’s Actually Happening
When a NAS shows “healthy” disks but returns empty shares, the failure is almost always structural, not physical.
Common underlying causes include:
- Filesystem metadata damage
The volume mounts, but core filesystem structures (superblocks, allocation tables, inodes, or journals) are unreadable or inconsistent. - Partial or incorrect volume assembly
The RAID array may be assembling with incorrect member order, offsets, or parity state — producing a mountable but empty view. - Silent parity or metadata corruption
RAID-level damage may exist beneath the filesystem, even when the controller reports normal status.
On platforms like Synology and QNAP, the management interface reports hardware health, not data correctness. A green status does not mean your data is intact — only that the system has not detected a mechanical fault.
What Not to Do
The following actions commonly convert recoverable situations into unrecoverable ones:
- Do not remount, reinitialize, or “repair” the volume
- Do not delete and recreate shared folders
- Do not assume permissions caused the issue unless changes were made immediately beforehand
- Do not run filesystem checks that write changes without forensic validation
These actions overwrite allocation metadata and destroy orphaned file records that recovery depends on.
When to Escalate Immediately
Escalate this condition without further experimentation if:
- You did not intentionally delete the data
- Multiple shared folders became empty at once
- A reboot did not restore visibility
- The system reports normal status despite missing files
At this stage, every write increases risk. The system may still contain your data — but only if it is preserved in its current state.
What You Can Do Safely
Stop all non-essential activity on the NAS.
If remote triage is available, you may run JeannieLite to extract array and filesystem metadata for analysis. This process does not modify data and allows engineers to determine whether the volume can be reconstructed safely.
This condition is well understood and often recoverable — but only before corrective actions overwrite remaining structure.