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+--- Thread: help resetting and resetting up NAS RAID (/showthread.php?tid=12321)
help resetting and resetting up NAS RAID - Enquiries - 09-16-2025
Hi! I have a QNAP TS-451+ NAS with four 8TB disks. The person that set it up was not very helpful. They set up Apple Time Machine to keep taking space forever and I don't want that. I have copied all of the actual data (not Time Machine) onto a separate external drive and either want to wipe the Time Machine data so I have space again (if I need to wipe it completely and start over that's OK). Then I want to set up a back up of my laptop as well as redundancies for the actual data on the NAS.
Please help! I know this is a powerful device and I hope if someone helps me set it up correctly I can use it to its full power.
Thanks!
RE: help resetting and resetting up NAS RAID - ed - 09-16-2025
Good news is you’ve already done the most important step by backing up your actual data to an external drive. That means you’re free to reset the QNAP without risk of losing anything important.
On your TS-451+, you have two main options:
1. Clear only the Time Machine data
• Log into QTS, open Storage & Snapshots, and check which shared folder was used for Time Machine.
• If you just want to reclaim the space, you can delete that folder and recreate a smaller quota-based Time Machine target (for example, 1–2TB instead of unlimited). This way Time Machine won’t grow endlessly and will prune older backups automatically.
2. Wipe and rebuild the NAS
• If you’d prefer a clean start, you can reset the NAS and rebuild the storage pool. For your four 8TB drives, I’d recommend RAID 5 or RAID 6.
• RAID 5 gives you ~24TB usable with one drive of redundancy.
• RAID 6 gives you ~16TB usable with two-drive redundancy, which is safer.
• After creating the pool, make two shared folders: one for your actual data, one dedicated to Time Machine with a fixed quota.
Once rebuilt, you can re-enable Time Machine support under Network & File Services > Apple Networking and point macOS at the new quota-limited folder. For your main data, you’ll want to set up snapshots and possibly use Hybrid Backup Sync to push a copy to an external USB drive or to cloud storage, so you have a true backup beyond RAID.