The quiet box on the top of the shelf had the business records and the family archives all together, until a drive failed, a rebuild froze midway, or the enclosure died during the night. Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Buffalo, Netgear: crashed volumes from both Monks Cross office space and Fulford spare room space alike get rebuilt on this workbench. The drives come first. Never the enclosure.
All NAS jobs are checked at no cost. The quote is fixed and in writing, prior to raising a screwdriver.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Chip level, electronic and mechanical repair is charged at 50% at start-up, and the other 50% only upon successful recovery of your data; all BitLocker, ransomware, forensic and CCTV/DVR recoveries are charged at start-up when you accept our fixed quote. More information can be found on the data recovery cost page.
The first task on any NAS is correlating the problem (symptoms) with the cause (fault). In over twenty years of servicing NAS boxes, these twenty-five represent almost every single job that comes into this workshop.
Survivable and designed for, but it is also exactly the moment your array is an instant away from calamity. Treat the warning light as a fire bell.
Rebuild load is what kills off a tired survivor, and by a large margin, it is the most common NAS disaster booked into this workshop.
The logical part of the array went down but the underlying files didn't. In this case, the "restore" option has nothing for you, so it is time for a virtual rebuild from images.
One reassuring click re-initialises your configuration, and sometimes it makes an early start on the data too. Good intentions; stop it anyway.
Firmware died during the flash, but the array around it is perfectly healthy. The drives don't care: once they are out of the box, we create images of each drive.
A power outage occurs while parity information is being written. Now the set cannot agree with itself and the volume won't mount. We reconcile it from complete images.
Electronic failure occurs in the box surrounding completely untouched drives. Once imaged, the member disks bring the volume back virtually. The box was always replaceable.
As long as their blocks stay unclaimed, both can be carved back, so you are good to go. This means the only important factor here is time. So just be quick and leave everything else alone.
Internet-accessible boxes are always an attractive target for attackers. They will wipe out as much as they can (the snapshot trees below, however, usually survive the "broom").
Pulled, shuffled, second-guessed. The metadata still knows the correct order when everyone else has forgotten (as long as the experiments stop immediately).
When a Synology box runs out of power in the middle of some process, its cleverly layered filesystem breaks apart. We then deconstruct this broken filesystem from the full images, layer by layer, in the order each layer was built on top of the previous one.
The DS220+ and DS923+ are the boxes that York's residential clients and small businesses actually run. Their crashed pools therefore make up our largest number of rebuild entries.
Flexible volumes give way in the event a member fails during an active write. First, every member is imaged. Only after all members have been imaged can the volume be stood up virtually.
A bricked single bay unit still holds a good (Linux formatted) disk. We simply mount it natively, copy the data off, and we're done with it.
Sometimes Buffalo boxes lose track of their array definitions. However, the disks within will always remember. We can therefore pull the layout back off the disks.
These were swapped by accident either when they were being cleaned (or because someone panicked). The array's metadata shows the true order, but if you had numbered each caddy beforehand, it might have saved everyone some anxiety.
Since ST4000VN008s made on the same production run wear at nearly identical rates, the second failure follows the first closely. As soon as one fails, make images of all of them.
Interrupted capacity growth will leave a pool that is half-stretched and cannot be mounted. We can reconstruct it from images if we follow the exact order of the expansion.
During error recovery, WD40EFPX members time out and are removed by the controller. On hardware that is prepared to wait, the same drive images cleanly.
A NAS sealed in an airless cabinet for years runs hot. When its drives finally fail within weeks of one another, we know it's time to image everything, because those failures cluster together.
SMR members function normally every day and collapse under resilvering loads, as the industry discovered in public. The SMR members are imaged with shingle-aware pacing prior to reconstruction.
Never-scrubbed drives that have stored up bad sectors for years suddenly "burn off" all at once, just when the system has spent its redundancy. Making an image first defuses this situation.
The little OS partitions on all of the drives are messed up (corrupted) and the machine will not boot, but the data partition is okay. So we take it out of an image.
When you carve block storage for use as NAS space, and the volume fails, the LUN file gets rebuilt and then the file system inside the LUN gets rebuilt: two rebuilds, one bill.
Bad memory corrupts data before btrfs checksums it, so the checksums vouch for the errors. Since you can't trust your volume after this has happened, we audit it.
A NAS can store files over multiple drives using RAID (or some other implementation by a vendor like SHR on Synology or BeyondRAID on Drobo), and the tolerance is less than they would have you believe. You can absorb one failure, and then the time comes to rebuild when a second old drive is most likely going to fail. Our recovery process does not allow anything to be written to your original disks at all. Each disk is captured completely. Order, striping and offset information is obtained from these captures. A virtual version of your volume is created prior to copying a single file.
Don't press the "rebuild" button. The wizard makes re-initialising look like help, but it is the single worst click you can make on the dashboard. Turn off power completely, remove each of the caddies one at a time and label them (by their bay) as they come out; it really does matter which way round these get put back into the array. Once you have your quote (0800 689 0668 or our free online diagnostic), post us all the labelled disks and keep the casing. For single-drive units, all that needs to be done is open the casing and send us the bare disk, and if the casing doesn't want to let go, please contact us before using any physical force. If you're still unsure, we'd rather you send the entire NAS unit than take any unnecessary risks. We've seen what happens when things get forced.
The NAS environment is essentially a RAID environment but with vendors using their own jargon. This workshop is fluent in the main ones:
Before anyone even mentions or theorises about what might have happened, each member of the RAID group is duplicated at the same time on a separate piece of hardware. So if anything goes wrong during the rebuild process, it happens to the duplicate and the original data is safe.
After imaging each member, the software uses the resulting images to determine which drive was the first member, second, third and so on in the RAID set. Once the order has been determined, the software works out how the data was striped and rotated across the members and where each member's data starts relative to the others. At that point the virtual RAID array is assembled based on these parameters. These parameters are shown and demonstrated (not assumed).
When one of the members fails it is treated as a complete single-drive case in its own right, and therefore everything related to it, such as the heads, firmware, controller board etc., will be examined until it can be properly imaged next to the other remaining members.
Both parity and entropy tests are used to check that the correct layout has been determined before a single file is copied. None of the guesses make it through to the next stage.
The proprietary layering used by the various systems (e.g., SHR & X-RAID, BeyondRAID, QNAP's flexible volumes, mdadm within LVM, btrfs and ext4) is translated back into simple folder structures.
Single-drive home units come apart with no issues; we simply mount their Linux-formatted disks natively and copy everything out in full.
It is the two-bay DiskStations and QNAP's TS-x53 series that actually live under the county's stairs and in its stockrooms, so they top our rebuild list, although Drobo's shutdown has left owners of BeyondRAID products stuck with lab-level recovery as the only option. Owners ask about drive order more than anything else, and an honest reply would be that the array metadata does remember. Even so, a number on each caddy (with a permanent marker or a piece of tape) before removal makes every step after that safer. Whatever the name on the box: please get a quote first on 0800 689 0668 or through the free online diagnostic, then turn off the device, number the drives according to bay position, and send us the drives but keep the casing (if the disks cannot be removed, send us the entire NAS).
Beneath the friendly surface of DSM lies an extensive collection of layers. From the bottom up, SHR stacks disparate drives into one pool using mdadm and LVM, with either btrfs or ext4 on top. The result is that "volume crashed" on a DS220+ translates to nonsense for general utilities. The stack is resolved here in the order each layer was created, always using complete member images: SHR layout determined, file system mounted virtually, then shared folders copied out clean. Regardless of their capacities, two-bay home boxes and RackStations use the same approach.
With each capacity increase, X-RAID will reshape a ReadyNAS volume without notifying you that it is doing so. In addition, this will leave the zones for expansion layered, as sediment layers are. Ordinary tools would diagnose these zones as damaged; however, when they are rebuilt in the same order that they were created, the zones can be mounted exactly as the manufacturer intended them to be. With the single bay budget units, the disks within have ext4 or XFS file systems, with Windows labelling them "blank" and offering to format them. However, do not format the disks: the shares are still intact and can be mounted natively on our equipment.
Get a quote first on 0800 689 0668 or complete the free online diagnostic. Then turn off the unit properly. Next draw each drive in turn and write its bay number directly onto that drive (one, two, three etc) before any of them is packed up. When you get to rebuild time that order will be priceless. Just the drives go travelling: the case stays at home unless it's a sealed single-bay case that cannot be opened.
Get a quote first, by calling us on 0800 689 0668 or using our free online diagnostic tool. After receiving your quote, tracked and insured post is how nearly every job reaches us: it is the fastest and safest way to get your drive to our lab in Leeds. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send, or you can hand it in at the Leeds lab's reception.
Is the hard drive or SSD still inside a machine, such as a laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR system or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from the machine first and then post just the bare drive by itself; we do not provide a service for removing drives from devices. For a server or RAID, send every disk, each clearly marked with its bay. For a NAS, send its disks labelled by bay if you can remove them, otherwise send the NAS itself. We cannot work on storage soldered to the motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, T2 Macs and certain slim laptops): if it doesn't come out, it can't come in. If you are unsure whether your storage is removable, call us before sending.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Once you have your quote, send your package addressed to Leeds Data Recovery (about a 40 minute drive from York on the A64 & A1(M) or next working day if you want to send it using trackable post). We will contact you as soon as we have taken delivery of your package and put it in line to be worked upon.
Can't figure out what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or try our free online diagnostic tool.
Free diagnosis, fixed written quote, and on most work you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or call our freephone.