It sat quietly in the background, but your NAS held all the important family documents or business files you relied on, until one of its drives failed, a rebuild went wrong or the whole box stopped working. We are able to recover Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Buffalo and Netgear NAS systems used by homes and businesses in Sheffield.
Free diagnostic on every NAS job. We provide a fixed price quote in writing before we start any work.
On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data. For electronic, mechanical and chip-level work, we'll take half up front and the rest only if we're able to recover your data. Jobs involving BitLocker, ransomware, forensic or CCTV/DVR work are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Complete pricing can be found on the data recovery cost page.
The first step in diagnosing every NAS job is to match the symptoms you've noticed with the fault behind them, and these ten cover almost everything we see in the lab.
The array survives this by design, but it's now one more failure away from disaster, and the rebuild is where the real risk lies.
The most common NAS catastrophe we see is a rebuild that puts stress on the remaining drives until one of them gives up.
The logical structure has failed, but the data is intact: the index has been lost and the dashboard is full of red.
The setup wizard 'helpfully' wipes the configuration, and sometimes starts on the data as well.
The NAS fails in the middle of an update, leaving the array stranded inside perfectly healthy drives.
Parity writes that are interrupted will desynchronise the members of an array, and the array can no longer be mounted after this happens.
The NAS box has failed but the drives have not, so the array is rebuilt virtually from the individual member disks.
Files and snapshots deleted or removed from a pool remain carvable as long as that space survives.
Exposed NAS boxes can be encrypted just like PCs, and in many cases snapshots and other remnants still exist underneath.
Drives pulled without labels, then put back in the wrong order. It's solvable, but stop before you start trying 'combinations'.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices spread files across several disks using RAID or proprietary layouts (such as Synology SHR and Drobo BeyondRAID). A NAS can survive a single failed disk; a second disk failing while the NAS is rebuilding is the disaster we see most. We start by imaging each of the disks, then reconstruct the array virtually from those images. The parameters, the disk order and even the offset positions on each disk are worked out by looking at the actual data. Once the virtual array is built, we extract your files from it, and nothing is written to your original disks at any stage.
Shut down your NAS and do not perform a rebuild or initialise it, even though the wizard will tempt you to. Get a quote before doing anything else by calling us on 0800 689 0668, or use our free online diagnostic tool. Then remove the drives if possible, label their bay order (1, 2, 3 and so on) with a pen or sticky notes, and send the drives. The enclosure is fine to keep with you. If the drives cannot be removed from the enclosure, send the NAS itself. Where you have a single-drive unit (such as a My Cloud), open the enclosure and send just that one drive. If it is sealed and doesn't want to be opened easily, please send the whole unit, or call us before sending anything on 0800 689 0668.
NAS recovery includes all of the steps in RAID recovery plus additional vendor-specific logic, and the bench handles both:
All member drives are imaged at the same time on dedicated imaging hardware before any analysis, and the original drives will never be part of another rebuild.
Once the drive images have been made, the bench works on them to determine the correct array geometry (member order, block size, rotation and offsets) so it can then mount the virtual array.
Failed member drives receive the full hard drive treatment (heads, firmware and PCB) so they can be imaged along with the rest.
Entropy and parity checks are performed to confirm the geometry was accurately reconstructed, before the file system is extracted from the newly restored volume.
The proprietary layers of Synology SHR, Drobo BeyondRAID, QNAP flex volumes, mdadm/LVM and BTRFS/ext4 are all translated back into ordinary files.
Single-drive units such as My Cloud open easily, and because their drives are Linux-formatted, they read natively on our workbench.
From two-bay home systems to rack-mounted small-business arrays, label the order of the drives before anything leaves the building.
A volume on a Synology product is a stack of layers rather than a single disk. SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) combines drives of different sizes into a single storage pool. Below this sit an mdadm layer (which creates the RAID set) and an LVM (Logical Volume Manager) layer, and DSM then formats the result as either btrfs or ext4. Therefore, when the dashboard declares a pool crashed, ordinary data recovery software will only see junk. To restore the volume, we start at the bottom of the stack and create an image of each member disk. Once that is done, we work out from the images how the disks were laid out in the SHR configuration, then mount the btrfs or ext4 volume virtually. Finally, we copy the data out of the shared folders. Every two-bay DiskStation through to the five-bay models, as well as the RackStation line, follows this same process, whatever combination of disk sizes it held.
ReadyNAS boxes running X-RAID re-shape the volume every time a larger drive is added, and the resulting stack of expansion zones looks like chaos to generic tools. We rebuild each zone in the exact order it was created and mount the finished volume just as the box would have. On the lower-cost side there's a simpler trap: single- and two-bay D-Link devices and the smaller Netgear products use Linux file systems (ext4 or XFS) on their drives. Attach one of these to a Windows PC and it will show the drive as blank and offer to format it. Don't format it. The shares are still there, complete, and our lab reads Linux file systems natively.
Get a quote first by calling 0800 689 0668 or using the free online diagnostic. Then power the NAS down, take the drives out if you can and label each one with its bay number (Bay 1, Bay 2 and so on) before you post them, because the order is critical when we rebuild the array. Send the drives rather than the whole enclosure, but if they won't come out, send the NAS itself.
Please get a quote before sending your media to us, either by telephone on 0800 689 0668 or by completing our free online diagnostic. Once a customer has their quote, they post their media to us, tracked and insured.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from your machine and send us just the drive; we do not offer an internal drive-removal service. If you have a server or RAID system, please send us every disk, each clearly labelled with its bay. We cannot recover data from storage that is soldered directly onto the motherboard (for example Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), so we need removable drives to be sent to us. If you are unsure which kind you have, ring us first.
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Mark your package for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery and we will contact you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure about what to send? Call us first on 0800 689 0668 or complete our free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote and, in most cases, you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.