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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

What kind of legal route is there though? The NASes were explicitly sold without support for btrfs (when I was looking at options, they were clear about that). They explicitly did not allow creation of btrfs arrays and did not expose any settings related to them.

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?

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> They explicitly did not allow creation of btrfs arrays and did not expose any settings related to them.

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if it was supposedly sold without support for it, might lead people to believe that the specs or documentation were outdated especially since the current documentation is actually outdated on many other matters and cannot be relied to 100% accurately reflect the current usage of the product.

Oh, so all those car commercials of a normal econobox showing high performance, zooming around hairpin turns - I should expect that from my own car because it was in the commercial?

Yeah, assume documentation is outdated. That makes sense.

I don't know what your issue is apart from maybe being a Synology shill.

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.

Your analogy is all wrong, since they advertised these as NOT supporting BTRFS, but they did anyway.

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 still don’t think the analogy captures the reality of the situation. I’d argue it’s more like buying a car that advertised room for five passengers, but when it’s delivered your discover a third row giving you enough room for your entire family of seven. Until you take it in for an oil change, when they lock your kids in the trunk and try to sell you an SUV.

There's an underlying assumption that btrfs support on those devices was actually production level stable and ready for use.

(I know btrfs on ARM wasn't really all that great at times.)

How horrible it would be if commercials had to be truthful.

There's a theory that all adverts, that are not simply information are economic loss. This presumes that vanity has no economic value. How can you legislate when people want to be lied to.

A few people seem to have confirmed this isn't actually true - at some point, it was possible to set up at least some of the affected NAS devices using btrfs via the standard GUI on the device. It's possible there were some intermediate software releases which disabled that but still allowed existing btrfs volumes to be used.

The way they have gone out of their way to deliberately remove the functionality could be argued to cause damages to people who are using the unsupported functionality.

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.

Wasn’t supported. There’s no standing here. If I find out my Tesla can change traffic lights for me due to a bug, and then Tesla fixed the bug, it doesn’t mean I get to sue Tesla for that.

Nope, this is like if higher models of Teslas had a more in-depth mode on the display for a couple of years. When you first buy your lower model, during the on-boarding process with the dealer, they walk you through the setup process and ask if you'd like the standard view or the more detailed one. You say you want the more detailed one.

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.

Sue them for damages and see what sticks. Causing data loss like this is inexcusable.

As a customer in Germany I sure hope the consumer protection agency (Verbraucherzentrale) could make them sing.

Way too technical, will never get anywhere. Have better backups and don’t play cute games with important data storage.

No, the outcome is really simple. You had your DS420j humming along yesterday, then this DSM update comes around and installs overnight, and this morning you have no access to your files.

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.

Judge: Where's your backup?

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