The quiet box on the shelf held the company files and the family archive both — until a drive dropped out, a rebuild froze halfway, or the enclosure died in the night. Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Buffalo, Netgear: crashed volumes from Monks Cross offices and Fulford spare rooms alike get rebuilt on this bench. Drives first, enclosure never.
Every nas external drive job is diagnosed free. The quote turns up fixed, in writing, before a screwdriver is lifted.
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.
First job on any nas external drive is putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
Designed-for, survivable — and also the exact moment your array stands one hiccup from calamity. Treat the amber light as a fire bell.
Rebuild load is what finishes a tired survivor, and it is the most frequent NAS disaster booked into this workshop. By some margin.
The array logic failed; the files beneath did not. This is reconstruction country — the restore button has nothing for you here.
One reassuring click re-initialises the configuration and sometimes makes an early start on the data. Kind intentions; stop it anyway.
Firmware died mid-flash around a perfectly healthy array. The drives neither know nor care — out they come, in they image.
A power cut mid-parity-write leaves the set disagreeing with itself and the volume refusing to mount. Reconciled from complete images.
Box electronics fail around untouched drives. Imaged members bring the volume back virtually; the enclosure was always replaceable.
Both carve back while their blocks stay unclaimed. The variable that matters is time, so move quickly and touch nothing.
Internet-facing boxes make appealing prey. Attackers purge what they can — the snapshot trees below often escape the broom.
Pulled, shuffled, second-guessed. The metadata remembers the true order even when nobody else does — provided the experiments end now.
Synology's clever layering rips when power vanishes mid-thought. We unpick it from full images, stratum by stratum, in build order.
DS220+ and DS923+ boxes are what York's homes and small firms genuinely run, so their crashed pools top our rebuild ledger.
Flexible volumes give way when a member dies mid-write. Every drive is imaged first; only then is the volume stood up virtually.
A bricked single-bay still cradles a healthy Linux-formatted disk. We mount it natively, copy it out, and that's that.
Buffalo boxes misplace their array definitions now and then. The member disks never forget; we take the layout back off them.
Swapped during cleaning or panic. Array metadata testifies to the true order — though numbering caddies beforehand would have spared the suspense.
Same-batch ST4000VN008s wear at matched rates, so the second failure shadows the first closely. The day one goes, image them all.
Interrupted capacity growth leaves a pool half-stretched and unmountable. Reconstructed from images following the expansion sequence exactly.
WD40EFPX members time out during error recovery and get expelled by the controller. On hardware prepared to wait, the same drive images clean.
Sealed in an airless cabinet, a NAS runs hot for years — then its drives fail within weeks of one another. That clustering is your cue to image everything.
SMR members cope with everyday duty then buckle under resilver load, as the industry learned in public. Imaged with shingle-aware pacing before reconstruction.
Never-scrubbed archives bank hidden bad sectors for years, all redeemed in one afternoon precisely when redundancy is spent. Imaging first defuses it.
The little OS partitions across the drives corrupt and the box won't start, while the data volume behind them sits intact. We extract it from images directly.
Block storage carved into NAS space rips when the volume does. The LUN file gets repaired, then the file system within it — two rebuilds, one invoice.
Faulty memory writes errors that btrfs then faithfully certifies. The volume needs auditing rather than trusting, so auditing is what happens.
A NAS spreads files across its drives with RAID or a vendor's variation on it — SHR on Synology, BeyondRAID on Drobo — and the tolerance is thinner than the brochure suggests: one failure absorbed, and then the rebuild arrives at exactly the moment a second elderly drive is likeliest to quit. The method here keeps your originals out of the firing line altogether. Every member gets imaged in full; order, stripe and offsets are worked out from those captures; the volume is stood up virtually before one file is copied. Nothing writes back to your disks at any stage. Nothing.
Step away from the rebuild button — the wizard makes re-initialising look like help, and it's the most destructive click on the dashboard. Power down cleanly, pull each caddy, and number every drive as it comes out; order matters enormously when the array goes back together. Post the numbered drives, keep the enclosure. Single-drive units just need the shell opened and the bare disk sent — and if the shell fights back, ring before applying force. We've seen what force does.
NAS work is RAID work spoken in vendor dialects, and the workshop speaks the main ones fluently:
All members cloned simultaneously on dedicated hardware before theories are aired. Rebuild risk lands on the copies; the originals spectate.
From the images it settles order, stripe, rotation and offset, then stands the array up virtually. The geometry is demonstrated, never assumed.
A failed member is treated as a full hard-drive case in its own right — heads, firmware, boards — until it images beside the rest.
Parity and entropy testing confirm the solved layout before one file is lifted. Guesses do not get past this stage.
SHR and X-RAID, BeyondRAID, QNAP's flexible volumes, mdadm under LVM, btrfs and ext4 — proprietary layering translated back into plain folders.
One-drive home units opened cleanly, their Linux-formatted disks mounted natively and copied out in full.
Two-bay DiskStations and QNAP's TS-x53 range are what actually hums under the county's stairs and stockrooms, so they head our rebuild ledger — while Drobo's shutdown stranded every BeyondRAID owner at lab-level recovery only. Owners ask about drive order more than anything else; the truthful answer is that array metadata remembers it, but a marker pen on each caddy before removal makes every subsequent step safer. Whatever the badge on the box: power off, number the drives, send the drives, keep the shell.
Beneath DSM's friendly face stands a tall stack — SHR blending odd drive sizes into one pool, mdadm and LVM below, btrfs or ext4 above — which is why 'volume crashed' on a DS220+ reads as gibberish to generic tools. Here the stack gets solved in the order it was built, always from complete member images: SHR arrangement derived, file system mounted virtually, shared folders walked out clean. Two-bay home boxes and RackStations take the identical route, whatever mixture of capacities they carried.
Every capacity upgrade makes X-RAID silently reshape a ReadyNAS volume, leaving expansion zones layered like sediment that ordinary tools misdiagnose as damage; reassembled in the order of their creation, the zones mount exactly as the box intended. The single-bay budget units set a simpler trap: their disks carry ext4 or XFS, which Windows calls blank and offers to format. Refuse it — the shares sit there entire, and both file systems mount natively on our rigs.
Power the unit down properly, then draw each drive in turn, writing its bay number directly on the drive — 1, 2, 3 and so on — before any of them is boxed. At rebuild time that order is worth its weight in gold. Only the drives travel; the enclosure stops at home unless it's a sealed single-bay you can't open.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
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Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, no fix no fee on most work — start online or ring the freephone.