A RAID 1 mirror that's gone read-only, lost both drives or died along with its NAS controller still needs proper recovery — a mirror doesn't cover corruption or a dead enclosure. We image both disks 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 ride out one dead disk — but shared faults, dead controllers and bad rebuilds still lose data.
A mirror writes the same data to two disks, so one failure is survivable. But drives bought and run as a pair age at the same rate, and one surge, heatwave or spell of wear can take both.
In a two-bay NAS or external mirror the controller or bridge board can fail while both disks stay fine. The mirror won't mount until those disks are read directly and the file system rebuilt.
Swap the wrong disk, or let the box rebuild the wrong way, and it copies the blank or older drive 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 members end up holding different versions of your data. Merge them wrongly and the result is corrupt.
Because the two halves are identical, a logical fault — corruption, a bad update or a deletion — is faithfully written to both disks at once. Redundancy is no defence against that.
A failed firmware flash or an OS fault on the NAS itself can leave a perfectly healthy mirror locked away until the volume is rebuilt from images.
We treat a mirror as two separate disks. Both members are cloned to stable images on hardware imagers, and any physically failing disk is repaired in the clean room first. We then establish which member holds the fullest, most recent 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 guards against one disk dying, and nothing more. Deletions, formatting, corruption, ransomware and failed updates are copied to both disks the instant they happen, and a controller failure can lock both away at once. That's why a mirror going wrong still needs real recovery, and why a genuine backup lives on separate media entirely.
Most mirrors we recover sit inside two-bay Synology, QNAP and Netgear NAS units or small-business servers, serving homes and businesses across Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster and Chesterfield. Media is posted or couriered to our Leeds 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 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.