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 data recovery cost page.
Every nas external drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
The design absorbs it — but you're now one more failure from losing everything, and the rebuild itself is the danger zone.
No NAS disaster reaches us more often: the rebuild leans on the ageing survivors until one of them quits.
A dashboard full of red usually means the logical structure collapsed while the data itself sat tight — the index went, not the files.
One trip through the setup wizard 'helpfully' erases the configuration — and occasionally makes a start on the data too.
An update bricks the box halfway through, leaving a perfectly healthy set of drives with an array trapped inside them.
A power cut mid-parity-write knocks the members out of step with each other, and the array won't mount again.
When only the NAS itself has died, the array is stood back up virtually from the member disks it left behind.
Shares and snapshots deleted from the pool can still be carved out — provided the space they held isn't reused.
An internet-exposed NAS gets encrypted just like a PC — yet snapshots and remnants frequently survive beneath the attack.
Unlabelled drives put back in the wrong bays is fixable — as long as nobody starts 'trying combinations' first.
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.
Under the vendor's badge a NAS is a RAID with a dialect, and this bench handles the array and the dialect together:
Before anyone analyses anything, each member drive is copied at the same time on its own dedicated hardware — an original never goes back into a rebuild.
Runs against the copies to work out the array's geometry — which drive sat where, block size, rotation, offsets — then brings the array up virtually.
A failed member isn't abandoned: it gets the complete hard drive treatment — heads, firmware, electronics — until it can be imaged with the rest.
The solved geometry is proven with parity and entropy checks before the file system is lifted off the reassembled volume.
The proprietary layers — Synology SHR, Drobo BeyondRAID, QNAP flex volumes, mdadm/LVM, BTRFS and ext4 — are translated back into plain files.
A My Cloud-style single-drive box opens without drama, and its Linux-formatted drive reads natively here.
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.
Synology's SHR lets mismatched drive sizes share one storage pool, and the price of that flexibility is a stack of mdadm, LVM and often btrfs layered on top of one another — which is why a pool DSM reports as crashed makes no sense to ordinary recovery software. We work down that stack and back up again: each member drive is captured first, the pool structure is reassembled from the layers, and the shared folders are extracted from the rebuilt volume. Everything from two-bay DiskStations to five-bay units and rack-mount RackStations follows the same process, whatever mix of drive sizes is inside.
ReadyNAS boxes running X-RAID grow their volume automatically as larger drives are fitted, and each expansion leaves another RAID zone stacked on the members — a layout generic tools misread completely. Newer units add btrfs on top under ReadyNAS OS, so a dead box or a volume lost after a power cut needs vendor-aware reconstruction rather than guesswork. We map the zones from each member disk, rebuild the expansion history in order, and lift the data from the reassembled volume.
Budget D-Link ShareCenter and Buffalo LinkStation units are sold as plug-in home backup, but their drives are formatted with Linux file systems — ext or XFS — that a Windows PC cannot read at all. So when the enclosure fails and the drive is tried in a desktop, it shows as blank and invites a format: decline, because the data is sitting there in perfect order. Single-bay units and mirrored two-bay pairs alike are read with the lab's ext and XFS parsers and the shares copied out complete.
Shut the NAS down, pull the drives, and WRITE THE BAY NUMBER on each one (1, 2, 3…) before anything goes in a box — reconstruction depends on knowing that order. Post the drives themselves and keep the enclosure, unless yours is a single-bay unit.
Most customers post their media to us tracked and insured.
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.