So today I have my first outage since switching to Synology NAS some seven years ago*. I received an email from my primary NAS, a DS218+, that the box would be going down for a reboot following an update. Some hours later I tried to view one of my internal portal sites, no response. So I checked the unit, to find a flashing blue power light, none of the green status lights were illuminated. I was concerned, especially after searching the forums and discovering posts with titles such as "Blinking blue light of death". However I decided it was best not to act in haste and left the box overnight in case it was a particularly lengthy update.

In the morning the blue light was still flashing and the box did not respond. I stripped the unit down, removing the drives and memory expansion and ran through Synology's diagnosis steps and it was confirmed that the box was dead. I raised an support ticket with Synology, who concurred and instructed me to first contact the reseller for RMA, in this case Amazon. I have to say I have been consistently impressed with Amazon's no quibble returns policy - I received a notification that a replacement had been shipped within a couple of hours.

I have a data backup strategy that I believe is fairly robust - RAID 1 mirrored drives in the unit, one backup on-site and one off. So I am confident that the data is safe. Unfortunately I don't have a contingency for a unit failure other than RMA, as it wouldn't be worth my while in expense or resources having a second redundant unit. My critical day to day business data is hosted in the cloud in any case.

• Well, not technically the first, I've had drives fail before. But recovery in that case is simply a matter of popping in a replacement drive and letting the RAID array reconfigure itself, with zero downtime. I've yet to have to resort to restoring from the backup drives.