Your NAS quietly held everything the family or business relied on — until a drive failed, a rebuild went sideways or the box itself died. We recover Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Buffalo and Netgear NAS systems for homes and businesses throughout Staines and Surrey.
Free diagnostic on every nas external drive job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the free diagnostic page.
Every nas external drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Survivable by design — but the array is now one failure from disaster and rebuilds are the risky part.
The most common NAS catastrophe we see: the rebuild stresses the survivors and one gives up.
The logical structure broke — data intact, index gone, dashboard full of red.
The setup wizard 'helpfully' wipes the config — and sometimes starts on the data.
The box bricks mid-update with the array stranded inside perfectly healthy drives.
Interrupted parity writes desync the members; the array refuses to mount afterwards.
The NAS dies, the drives don't — the array is rebuilt virtually from the member disks.
Files and snapshots removed from the pool are carvable while the space survives.
Exposed NAS boxes get encrypted like PCs — snapshots and remnants often survive underneath.
Drives pulled without labels then reinserted wrong — solvable, but stop before 'trying combinations'.
Synology SHR arrays and their btrfs metadata corrupt after a bad shutdown — the volume is rebuilt from the imaged members.
Netgear ReadyNAS and legacy Iomega StorCenter units lose their proprietary volume config — reconstructed straight off the drives.
A NAS spreads your data across drives in RAID or proprietary layouts like Synology SHR or Drobo BeyondRAID. One failed drive is survivable; a second failure during the rebuild is the disaster we're called about most. We image every drive first, then reconstruct the array virtually — working out the parameters, order and offsets from the data itself — before extracting your files. Nothing is ever written back to your original drives.
Power the NAS down and resist running a rebuild or re-initialising, however inviting the wizard makes it look. Remove the drives, label their bay order (1, 2, 3…) with a marker or sticky notes, and send the drives — the enclosure itself can stay put. For a single-drive unit like a My Cloud, open the case and send just the drive too; if it's sealed and won't open easily, call us first on 0800 689 0668.
NAS recovery is RAID recovery plus vendor-specific logic, and the bench covers both:
Every member drive is imaged simultaneously on dedicated hardware before any analysis — originals never join a rebuild again.
Works on the drive images to solve array geometry — member order, block size, rotation, offsets — and mount the virtual array.
Failed member drives get the full hard drive treatment (heads, firmware, PCB) so they can be imaged like the rest.
Entropy and parity analysis to verify the solved geometry, then file-system extraction from the reassembled volume.
Synology SHR, Drobo BeyondRAID, QNAP flex volumes, mdadm/LVM and BTRFS/ext4 — the proprietary layers translated back to files.
My Cloud-style single-drive units open cleanly; their Linux-formatted drives read natively on the bench.
Two-bay home boxes to rack-mounted small-business arrays — label the drive order before anything leaves the building. Synology SHR volumes and their btrfs metadata corrupt after a bad shutdown; WD My Cloud and Buffalo LinkStation units brick on firmware updates with a healthy drive stranded inside; Netgear ReadyNAS and legacy Iomega StorCenter boxes lose their proprietary volume config; and QNAP units drop volumes when a member fails mid-write.
Power the NAS down, remove the drives, and LABEL each one with its bay number (1, 2, 3…) before you send them — the order is critical to rebuilding the array. Send the drives rather than the whole enclosure, unless it's a single-bay unit.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.