Not sure if Synology has their ass covered via terms of service. Even if they did, it’s their fault people lost access to their data.
Interesting to see how this unfolds.
To get btrfs, you had to use another btrfs capable NAS and then move the drives over to use that unsupported functionality (which was, again not documented and clearly marked as unsupported) and this patch has now removed a module that allowed for accidental use of that unsupported functionality.
What legal grounds do you have here?
The problem here is that they actually did allow it, and did expose those settings.
Seeing that the GUI allows BTRFS, even if it was supposedly sold without support for it, might lead people to believe that the specs or documentation were outdated especially since the current documentation is actually outdated on many other matters and cannot be relied to 100% accurately reflect the current usage of the product.
Yeah, assume documentation is outdated. That makes sense.
Features change in software all the time.
What's so outlandish about someone getting a new unit, it upgrades the software automatically on first run, and then the BTFRS filesystem is available to them use for the array.
You'd either not think twice about it or thank Synology for opening up the new feature for these lower end units.
Taking the feature away like this is the absolute trashiest behaviour.
So your analogy should be "Car commercial showed a slow but practical car, you buy the car and it turns out to have high performance and can zoom around corners, then a year later a software update forbids you from driving on the road to your house that has a high speed limit so now you can't get home"
(I know btrfs on ARM wasn't really all that great at times.)
There is no "downgrade" path from btrfs to ext4. Users have to move all their data off the NAS to some other storage, delete the btrfs volume, create a new ext4 volume and then copy the data back on.
These alleged damages are measurable in both time and the cost of storage rental.
Even worse, if you apply this upgrade without knowing that you need to do this procedure, your data is inaccessible until you contact customer support.
Then six months later Tesla pushes out a software update overnight that removes that view and offers no way to restore the old one, or start your car, or unlock it.
As a customer in Germany I sure hope the consumer protection agency (Verbraucherzentrale) could make them sing.
Synology provides no recourse, effectively bricking the device you own. See how Consumer protection agency likes that.
You being unable to access files miss out on some important work, or deadline. See how courts like that if you decide to bring a civil suit against Synology.