A RAID 1 mirror that's gone read-only, dropped both drives or died with its NAS controller still needs proper recovery — redundancy doesn't cover corruption or a dead box. We image both drives and rebuild your data safely.
Free diagnostic on every RAID job. One fixed quote in writing before any work — RAID recovery from £500 + VAT, priced per disk, no fix no fee on logical rebuilds.
A mirror should shrug off one dead disk — but shared faults, controller death and bad rebuilds still lose data.
A mirror writes the same data to two disks, so it shrugs off one failure. But drives bought and worked as a pair wear at the same rate, and the same surge, heat or age can take both together.
In a two-bay NAS or external mirror, the controller or bridge board can die while both disks stay healthy. The mirror won't mount until the disks are read directly and the file system rebuilt.
Replacing the wrong member, or letting the box rebuild in the wrong direction, copies the blank or older disk over your good data — overwriting the very files you needed to keep.
If a mirror runs degraded on one disk, then later on the other, the two members end up holding different versions of your data. Merging them incorrectly corrupts the result.
Because both halves of a mirror are identical, a logical fault — corruption, deletion or a bad update — is faithfully copied to both disks at once. Redundancy is no protection against that.
A failed firmware update or OS fault on the NAS itself can leave a perfectly healthy mirror inaccessible until the volume is rebuilt from images.
We treat a mirror as two independent disks. Both members are cloned to stable images with hardware imagers, and any physically failing disk is repaired in the clean-air lab first. We then work out which member holds the most complete, most recent copy of your data, rebuild the file system from the best image, and extract your files — your original disks are never written to.
RAID 1 protects against a single disk dying — nothing more. Deletions, formatting, corruption, ransomware and failed updates are mirrored instantly to both disks, and a controller failure can lock both away at once. That's why a mirror going wrong still needs real recovery, and why a true backup lives on separate media.
Most mirrors we recover sit inside two-bay Synology, QNAP and Netgear NAS units or small-business servers, serving customers and businesses across Surrey and west London. Media is posted or couriered to our Guildford location — for other array types see our RAID recovery and NAS recovery pages, and typical data recovery costs.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee on logical rebuilds — start now or call the freephone.
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.
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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.