Your NAS quietly stored everything the family or business needed — until a drive failed, a rebuild went wrong or the box itself died. We recover Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Buffalo and Netgear NAS systems for Sheffield homes and businesses.
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 ten 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'.
A NAS spreads data across drives in RAID or proprietary layouts (Synology SHR, Drobo BeyondRAID). One failed drive is survivable; a second failure during the rebuild is the disaster we see most. We image every drive first, then reconstruct the array virtually — parameters, order and offsets worked out from the data itself — before extracting your files. Nothing is written to your original drives at any stage.
Power the NAS down and don't run a rebuild or re-initialise, however tempting the wizard makes it look. Remove the drives and label their bay order (1, 2, 3…) with a marker or sticky notes, then send the drives — the enclosure itself can stay with you. For a single-drive unit like a My Cloud, open the enclosure 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.
A Synology volume is a stack rather than a disk: SHR blends mismatched drive sizes into one storage pool, mdadm and LVM sit beneath it, and DSM formats the result as btrfs or ext4 — so when the dashboard declares a pool crashed, ordinary recovery software sees only noise. We solve the stack from the bottom up: image every member drive, derive the SHR layout from the images, then mount the btrfs or ext4 volume virtually and copy the shared folders out. Two-bay DiskStations through to five-bay units and RackStations all follow that same route, whatever mix of drive sizes they held.
ReadyNAS boxes running X-RAID re-shape the volume every time a larger drive is fitted, and the resulting stack of expansion zones reads as chaos to generic tools — we rebuild the zones in the order they were created and mount the finished volume exactly as the box would have. The budget end — single- and two-bay D-Link units and the smaller Netgear models — hides a simpler trap: their drives carry Linux file systems such as ext4 and XFS, so a Windows PC shows them as blank and offers to format. Skip the format; the shares are sitting there complete, and the lab reads them natively.
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 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.
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Mark the package for the attention of Leeds 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.