NAS units were always silently holding your family's or company's critical information, until one of the drives failed, a rebuild ran into problems or the unit itself stopped working. We recover both personal and commercial NAS units (Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Buffalo, Netgear) across Staines and Surrey.
Every NAS recovery job gets a free diagnosis, as well as one fixed written quote prior to starting any work.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For all electronic and mechanical work, including chip-level repairs, 50% is required upfront, with the balance only payable if we recover your data. For BitLocker, ransomware, CCTV/DVR and forensic jobs, full payment is made upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Full details regarding our costs can be found on the data recovery cost page.
All NAS jobs begin by identifying the symptom(s), then determining what caused the symptom(s). These twelve common causes account for almost every failure that reaches our bench.
The design will absorb it, but you're now just one more failure away from losing everything, and once you rebuild, you'll be entering "the danger zone".
We see this more than any other type of NAS disaster: the rebuild process relies upon the remaining ageing drives until one of them fails.
If there are many red indicators displayed on the dashboard, it generally indicates the indexing (logical) structure of your data collapsed while the actual data remained intact: the index crashed, not the files themselves.
Going through the setup wizard once "helpfully" wipes away your previous configuration, sometimes even making a few attempts at wiping your data as well.
Some updates brick the box in the middle of installing them, leaving perfectly healthy hard drives with a RAID array stuck inside.
If during a parity write operation you lose power to the NAS unit (causing some or all of its members to go out of sync with each other), you will find that your array will no longer mount.
In cases where only the NAS hardware has died, we can virtually recreate the original array using the individual disk members which still exist.
We are still able to carve out shares and/or snapshot information that has been removed from the pool, as long as this is done before the space those pieces of information used is reassigned.
While an internet-exposed NAS receives the same encryption as a PC, there are often snapshots and remnants left behind beneath the attack.
If you simply place unmarked drives back into the incorrect bays, it's repairable (as long as nobody begins trying combinations first).
Synology SHR arrays and their associated btrfs metadata become corrupted when a NAS system experiences a bad shutdown; the volume is then re-created based on images taken of the member disks.
Both Netgear ReadyNAS and legacy Iomega StorCenter units lose their proprietary configuration for volumes, and these configurations are recreated directly from disk.
A NAS distributes your data across multiple drives using either RAID or a proprietary layout such as Synology SHR or Drobo BeyondRAID. When one drive fails, the array should survive it, but when another drive fails while the NAS is rebuilding its RAID, that is the disaster we're called about most. We take images of all drives first, then use those images to create a virtual replica of the RAID structure (determining parameters, order and offsets based upon what was found in each image) prior to retrieving your files. Nothing is ever written back to your original drives.
Shut down your NAS and do not run a rebuild or re-initialise, even though you will see a wizard inviting you to. Take the drives out of your NAS (if possible) and label them in bay order (1, 2, 3…) using a marker or sticky notes. Once you receive a quote by telephone on 0800 689 0668 or through our free online diagnostic, send the drives (the NAS housing does not need to be sent). If the drives are stuck inside the NAS, please send the entire NAS. For a one-bay NAS, such as a My Cloud, open the casing and send only the internal drive. If the case is sealed and won't open easily, we'll accept the NAS itself.
Under the brand name, a NAS is really RAID technology with its own dialect, and this bench analyses both the array structure and the dialect together:
Every drive is duplicated at the same time onto its own independent piece of equipment, before anyone analyses any information on the individual drives; no original drive ever goes back into any kind of rebuild process.
Analyses each copy to determine how the drives were configured as part of the RAID array: which bay each drive occupied, the block size, the rotation and the offsets. Once those parameters have been determined, it brings up a virtual version of the RAID array.
Failed members don't get left behind either: they get the complete hard drive treatment (heads, firmware and electronics) until they're able to be imaged along with the other members of the RAID.
Once the above has been completed, the resulting geometry is verified via parity and entropy tests before the files are restored from the reassembled volume.
The proprietary layers (Synology SHR, Drobo BeyondRAID, QNAP flex volumes, mdadm/LVM, BTRFS and ext4) are all converted back into plain files.
A single-drive My Cloud-style unit opens cleanly, and its Linux-formatted drive can be read natively here.
From two-bay home units to rack-mounted small-business arrays, you need to label the correct drive order before anything leaves your building. After an improper shutdown, the SHR volumes created by Synology and their associated btrfs metadata can become corrupted. WD My Cloud and Buffalo LinkStation units have been known to "brick" on firmware updates with a healthy drive remaining within the enclosure. Netgear ReadyNAS and older Iomega StorCenter boxes can lose their proprietary volume configurations, and failure of a drive while writing data can cause a QNAP volume to be lost.
Since SHR allows drives of different sizes to share a common storage pool, it creates a layering of mdadm and LVM, often with btrfs on top, which is why a pool DSM reports as crashed makes little sense to ordinary recovery software. As such we need to un-layer our way through these layers and then re-build them back out. Each individual drive in the pool is captured first. Once all the drives are saved, we rebuild the pool structure from the layers, and once the pool has been restored, we extract the shared folders from it. 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 using X-RAID increase their volume automatically as larger hard disks are added, and every expansion forms an additional RAID zone above the existing ones, a layout that generic recovery software has no understanding of. Newer ReadyNAS models come with btrfs built into ReadyNAS OS, so a failed ReadyNAS unit or a volume lost after a power failure requires vendor-aware reconstruction instead of simply guessing. We capture the RAID zones from each member disk, reconstruct the expansion history in order, and then pull the data off the restored volume.
The budget units (D-Link ShareCenter and Buffalo LinkStation), marketed as plug-and-play home backup devices, use a Linux-based file system (ext or XFS) which Windows cannot read at all. When one of these enclosures fails and the drive is inserted into a desktop, it appears empty and invites a format: decline, because the original files are intact. Single-bay units and mirrored two-bay pairs alike are read with the lab's ext and XFS parsers, and the entire share is copied out.
Shut the NAS down. If possible, remove the hard disks from the NAS system and write the bay number on each disk (1, 2, 3…) before placing them into boxes; the recovery can't be completed unless we know which bay each drive was located in. Get a quote first by phone on 0800 689 0668 or with our free online diagnostic, then post the drives themselves and keep the enclosure. If the drives won't come out, the NAS itself is fine to send.
Before sending anything, get a quote from us either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic. Then post your hardware to us (tracked and insured), or drop it off at our Guildford laboratory in person.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR or server? You will need to remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive, as we are unable to remove the drive for you. We also cannot recover storage soldered onto a motherboard, such as in Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops. Only drives that can be removed from a machine and sent to us can be recovered. If you are unsure whether your device has a removable drive, please call us before sending. RAID, server and SAN drives need to be removed from their enclosure and labelled by bay. For a NAS, send the disks themselves if they are removable, otherwise the entire NAS device. An external single drive should come to us whole, along with its cable and power supply.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Please mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery, and we will call you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure as to how to proceed with sending the item in for recovery? Then simply call 0800 689 0668, or complete the free online diagnostic prior to dispatching the item to obtain your price quotation.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.