A RAID 1 (mirror) that has gone read-only, lost both drives or failed along with its attached NAS controller still needs proper recovery, because a mirror does not protect against corruption or the failure of its enclosure. We create images of both disks so that your data can be rebuilt safely.
Free diagnostic on every RAID job. You get one fixed quote in writing before any work starts. RAID recovery is from £500 + VAT, priced per disk, and on logical rebuilds you only pay if we recover your data.
A mirror configuration allows for the loss of a single drive, but shared faults, a dead controller or a bad rebuild can still lose you data.
When using a mirrored configuration, the same data is written to two different physical drives. Therefore, if one drive fails, your data is still intact on the second drive. However, because the drives were bought as a pair and used together, they also age at the same rate. As such, one power surge, one heatwave or just an extended period of heavy use could damage both drives.
When the controller or bridge board in a two-bay NAS or external mirror fails, it can leave both of the physical disks intact. The mirrored files still won't be available, though, until those disks are read directly and the file system is rebuilt.
If the wrong disk is swapped into one of the bays, or the box rebuilds the wrong way, the mirroring process will copy the blank or older disk over your good data, overwriting exactly what you needed to keep.
If a mirror runs degraded on one disk and later on the other, the two halves end up holding different versions of your data, and merging them the wrong way gives you a corrupt result.
Because the two members of the mirror are exact duplicates, a logical failure (corruption, a bad update or a deletion) is written identically across both sides at once. Redundancy therefore does nothing to protect you from such errors.
Sometimes the mirror itself is perfectly healthy, but a failed firmware flash or an OS fault on the NAS locks it away, and the volume has to be rebuilt from images before you can get at your data.
We treat a mirror as two separate disks. Each side is cloned to a stable image using hardware imagers, and if one disk is physically failing, it is repaired on our head-swap bench first. Next we work out which side holds the most complete and current copy of your data, rebuild the file system from the strongest image and pull your files off. We never write to your original disks.
RAID 1 protects you from losing data if one of your hard drives fails, and nothing more. It does not protect you from the many other things that can go wrong: deletions, formatting, file system corruption, ransomware and software updates gone wrong are all copied to both disks the instant they happen, and a controller failure can lock both disks away at once. That's why a mirror that goes wrong still needs real recovery, and why a genuine backup belongs on separate media entirely.
Most of the mirrors we recover sit inside two-bay NAS boxes from Synology, QNAP and Netgear, or in small-business servers, for homes and businesses in Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster and Chesterfield. The media is posted to our Leeds location, tracked and insured. For other RAID configurations see our RAID recovery and NAS recovery pages, as well as typical data recovery costs.
There is no charge for the diagnostic, your fixed price quotation will be provided prior to beginning any recovery, and on logical rebuilds you only pay if we recover your data. Call our freephone today, or start now.
Most of our clients will receive a price quotation prior to posting their media to us. They can obtain this by phoning us on 0800 689 0668 or using our free online diagnostic tool. Upon receipt of their quotation, clients may then post their media to us. All parcels will be tracked and insured.
Are you sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from your machine and post just the drive to us. We do not provide an internal drive removal service. For servers and RAID systems, please send all disks that you have, each labelled with the bay number of where it was located in the system. We are unable to retrieve data from drives that are soldered directly onto the motherboard (for instance, Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) as these drives cannot be removed from the motherboard. In order for us to perform recovery services, we must receive removable drives. If you are not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
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