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I have a Synology disk station, mounted with 2 disks (12TB each) running in mirror mode. I have also setup user directory for everyone in my family, meaning there are

I was told if in any event I need to expand my disk space, I can just buy a HD with bigger capacity, take out one of the mirrored HD, plug in the new HD and it will do mirror by itself. Then I just need to repeat this once more with another HD with larger capacity and it will be done.

I am just wondering will the file/directory ownership still presist after the HD switch?? I assume yes as long as I am using the same disk station.

But what if I need to swtich to another NAS, will those file ownership still presist? My disk station is getting old and I am doing some planning to swtich to better and faster NAS. I am also worring what if my NAS crashes one day and I am able to retrieve the files inside the HD if there is file ownership associated with the files.

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A lot of NAS-es these days (like synology) are based on Linux. File and directory ownership are stored in the inodes of the filesystem as numbers.

So if you build a new NAS, just give your family members the same user-IDs on the new NAS as on the old one (assuming you can do that), and it should be fine.

If you cannot choose the user-id for you family members, log in on the NAS as root, and execute the command chown -R owner:group <dir> with the proper new user- and group IDs.

If you have root access to the NAS, you will be able to read all files, regardless of their permissions.

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  • HI Roland, when you said "same user-IDs" meaning literally their ID as in "Johnsmith" or a special IDs as in number that you mentioned?
    – Cloud Yoda
    Commented Dec 8, 2013 at 15:41
  • Both the number and the username are part of the same identity, but UNIX-like operating systems internally use the numerical user-ID. The usernames are for our convencience. If you look in the file /etc/passwd on the NAS, you will see the short username, the numerical UID (User ID), GID (Group ID) and the user's full name (among other things).
    – Roland Smith
    Commented Dec 8, 2013 at 16:36

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