The quiet box on the shelf was holding the company files and the family archive at once, which is how most people discover it was never really a backup. Then a disk dropped out, or a rebuild halted partway, or the whole unit was silent one morning. WD My Cloud, Synology, QNAP, Buffalo and Netgear volumes get put back together here from the disks themselves. Those travel; the enclosure stays with you.
Every nas external drive job is diagnosed free. The quote follows in writing, fixed, before a screwdriver is picked up.
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.
The first job on any nas external drive is matching the symptom to the fault — and after twenty-odd years, these thirty account for very nearly everything that comes through the door.
Designed for, survivable, and also the precise moment the array is one hiccup away from real trouble. Treat the amber light as a fire alarm rather than a suggestion.
Rebuild load is what finishes off a tired survivor, and it is comfortably the most common NAS disaster booked into this workshop. Not by a small margin, either.
The array logic has failed and the data underneath has not. This is reconstruction work, and the restore button on the box has nothing whatever to offer.
One reassuring click reinitialises the configuration, and on some models it makes an early start on the data as well. Good intentions, and it still needs stopping.
Firmware died mid-flash around an array in perfect health. The drives neither know nor care. Out they come and in they image.
A power cut during a parity write leaves the members disagreeing with one another and the volume declining to mount. Reconciled from complete images, where a disagreement costs nothing.
Box electronics fail around untouched drives more often than the drives fail. Imaged members bring the volume back virtually, and the enclosure was always the replaceable part.
Both carve back while their blocks stay unclaimed, so the variable that matters is time. Move quickly and touch nothing in the meantime.
Boxes reachable from the internet make appealing targets. Attackers purge what they can find, and the snapshot trees underneath frequently escape the sweep.
Pulled out, shuffled, second-guessed and reinserted. The array metadata still knows the real order, even if nobody else does, so long as the experimenting stops right now.
Synology's layering is clever and it tears when power vanishes mid-thought. It gets unpicked from full images, layer by layer, in the order it was built.
Two-bay and four-bay DiskStations are what homes and small firms around Norwich actually run, so their crashed storage pools sit at the top of the rebuild ledger here.
Flexible volumes give way when a member fails mid-write. Every drive is imaged first, and the volume is only stood up virtually after that.
A bricked single-bay unit still holds a healthy Linux-formatted disk. It gets mounted natively, copied out, and that is genuinely the whole job.
Buffalo boxes mislay their array definitions now and again. The member disks never forget, and the layout is taken back off them.
Swapped during cleaning, or during a panic. The metadata testifies to the true order, though a number written on each caddy first would have saved a good deal of suspense.
Same-batch ST4000VN006 drives wear at much the same rate, so the second failure treads closely on the first. On the day one goes, image the lot.
Interrupted capacity growth leaves a pool half stretched and unmountable. Reconstructed from images by following the expansion sequence exactly as it was attempted.
WD40EFPX members time out while recovering from an error and get dropped by the controller for taking too long. On hardware that is prepared to wait, the same drive images cleanly.
Shut into an airless cabinet, a NAS runs warm for years and then loses drives inside a few weeks of each other. That clustering is the signal to image the whole set rather than replace one drive.
SMR members handle everyday duty and buckle under resilver load, as the industry discovered in public a few years ago. Imaged with shingle-aware pacing before any reconstruction starts.
An archive that has never been scrubbed banks hidden bad sectors for years and redeems them all in one afternoon, precisely when the redundancy has been spent. Imaging first defuses it.
The small operating-system partitions mirrored across the drives corrupt and the box will not start, while the data volume behind them is perfectly sound. It is extracted from images directly.
Block storage carved out of NAS space tears when the volume does. The container file gets repaired and then the file system inside it — two reconstructions and one job.
Faulty RAM writes errors that the file system then faithfully certifies as correct. The volume needs auditing rather than trusting, and auditing is therefore what it gets.
A cache device set up in read-write mode holds data that has not yet reached the disks. Lose it, or lose one of a cache pair, and the volume will not mount because part of it is genuinely missing. The cache device is treated as a member in its own right and imaged like one.
When a NAS dies, the reasonable-sounding idea is to put the disks into another one. Different vendors write their arrays differently, and the new box will usually offer to initialise them. That offer is the point of no return, so the drives should come to a bench first.
Modern NAS file systems need free space to record changes, and a volume run to capacity can reach a state where it cannot even delete files to make room. Snapshots taking up the space make it worse. It untangles from an image without any of the risk of doing it live.
Synology and QNAP both offer folder-level encryption with a key file that owners are told to keep somewhere safe. Somewhere safe frequently turns out to be the NAS itself. Without the key or the passphrase the folder stays shut, and we say that plainly at the diagnostic stage.
The NAS was mirroring a laptop, files were tidied up on the laptop, and the mirror obediently removed them at the other end. Nothing failed and nothing was attacked. Snapshots and unallocated space are where those files are found, and how many come back depends on how long the box has run since.
A NAS spreads files across its disks using RAID or a vendor's own take on it. Synology calls its version SHR, Drobo called theirs BeyondRAID, and the tolerance built into any of them is thinner than the packaging implies. One failure gets absorbed quietly enough. The rebuild that follows then hammers every remaining disk for hours on end, which happens to be the precise moment when a second unit of the same age from the same production batch is likeliest to give up. The approach used here keeps your own disks well clear of all that. Each is copied in full first; stripe size, disk order and parity rotation are then worked out from those copies; and the volume is assembled in software before a single file is extracted. At no stage does anything get written back to your hardware.
Leave the rebuild button alone. The wizard presents re-initialising as the helpful next step and it is the most destructive option anywhere on that screen. Instead: shut the unit down cleanly, take the caddies out one at a time, and mark each disk with the bay number as it comes out, because that order matters a great deal when the array is put back together on a bench. Post the numbered disks and keep the empty enclosure at home. Single-disk units like a My Cloud only need the shell opening and the bare drive sending, and if the shell resists, ring before applying force to it. We have seen what force does to the plastic clips, and to the disk sitting behind them.
Buffalo boxes reach this bench more often than their share of the market suggests — LinkStation 210 and 220 units out of homes and small offices, TeraStation units out of firms that wanted four bays and something rack-shaped. Both hide the same reassuring fact. The disks inside a Buffalo are ordinary SATA drives, with no proprietary silicon holding the shares hostage and nothing in the enclosure that is needed in order to read them. What misleads people is the file system. Buffalo formats its volumes as XFS, with ext3 or ext4 on some of the older models, and Windows can make nothing of any of them, so a LinkStation disk connected straight to a PC is announced as blank with a helpful offer to format it. That is the one offer on the screen worth turning down. Here, each member disk is imaged in full, the RAID layout is worked out from those images rather than from the box that lost track of it, and the XFS volume is mounted in software so the shares walk out as ordinary folders. The job that keeps recurring is the rebuild that was allowed to run. A LinkStation flags one drive, a replacement goes in, the rebuild then reads every surviving disk end to end for hours, and a second drive of the same age and the same batch gives out partway through — at which point the array is down and the enclosure has nothing further to suggest. That is recoverable from the member disks, and it is recoverable a great deal more often when nobody has attempted a third rebuild first. Power it down, number the caddies, post the drives and keep the shell. Buffalo work is priced with the rest of the array bench, from £500 + VAT and rising with the number of disks.
NAS work is RAID work in a set of vendor dialects, and this workshop is fluent in the ones that matter:
Every member is cloned at the same time on dedicated hardware before anybody offers a theory. All the rebuild risk lands on copies while the originals sit and watch.
Order, stripe size, rotation and offset are worked out from the images, then the array is stood up virtually. The geometry gets demonstrated rather than assumed.
A failed member becomes a full mechanical case in its own right, heads and firmware and boards, until it images alongside the others.
Parity checks and entropy testing prove the solved layout out before any file at all is lifted. Nothing proceeds on a hunch.
SHR and X-RAID, BeyondRAID, the flexible volumes QNAP uses, mdadm beneath LVM, btrfs and ext4: proprietary layering turned back into plain folders.
Single-drive home units opened cleanly, with their Linux-formatted disks mounted natively and the contents copied out whole rather than in part.
Two-bay DiskStations and the TS-x53 range from QNAP are what actually hum away in stockrooms, studies and back offices across Norfolk, and they top the rebuild ledger accordingly. Drobo's closure left every BeyondRAID owner with lab-level recovery as the only route, which is a shame and also a fact. The question owners ask most is about drive order, and the truthful answer is that the array metadata does remember it — though a marker pen on each caddy before anything is pulled makes every later step safer and quicker. Whatever badge is on the front: power it down, number the drives, post the drives, and keep the shell.
DSM presents a friendly face and stands on a tall stack. SHR blends drives of unequal size into a single pool, mdadm and LVM sit beneath that, and btrfs or ext4 sits above it. That is why a crashed volume on a DS220+ looks like nonsense to general-purpose software: the tool is examining one layer while the answer is spread over three of them. The stack is solved here in the order somebody built it, and always from complete member images — the SHR arrangement is worked out, the file system is mounted virtually, and the shared folders are walked out intact. A two-bay unit from a spare room and a rackmount from a server cupboard take precisely the same route, whatever assortment of capacities they happened to hold.
Buffalo builds a plain box and that works in an owner's favour. A LinkStation 210 or 220 holds one or two ordinary SATA drives; a TeraStation holds four or six of the same, in RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 6. Nothing in the enclosure is needed in order to read them again. The volume is XFS on almost everything current, ext3 or ext4 on the older units, with the box's own operating system living on a small partition at the front of every member disk — which is why a Buffalo whose firmware has corrupted can look completely dead while the shares behind it are entirely intact. Each drive is imaged, the array is solved from those images, the XFS volume is mounted in software, and the folders are walked out. Two Buffalo habits are worth knowing. The units are usually fitted with drives from one batch, so when a rebuild starts hammering the survivors a second failure is far from unlikely; and the LinkStation's own repair wizard will happily re-initialise a volume it cannot make sense of. Power down, number the caddies and send the drives.
X-RAID reshapes a ReadyNAS volume quietly every time somebody adds capacity, and the result is a set of expansion zones layered up like sediment. Ordinary tools read that layering as damage and say so with some confidence. Put back together in the order those zones were created, the volume mounts exactly as the box always intended. The cheap single-bay units set a simpler trap for their owners: the disk inside carries ext4 or XFS, Windows sees nothing it recognises, declares the disk blank and offers to format it. Turn that offer down. The shares are sitting there complete, and both of those file systems mount natively on our benches.
Shut the unit down properly first, then take each drive out in turn and write its bay number onto the drive itself — one, two, three and so on — before any of them goes into a box. At reconstruction time that order earns its keep several times over. Only the drives need to travel; the enclosure stays with you unless it is a sealed single-bay you cannot open. Post them tracked and insured, send them by your own courier, or bring them in to reception at our Cambridge location. We do not collect, so the journey is yours to arrange.
Most of what reaches this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel posted in Norfolk is usually on the bench the next working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? The hard drive or SSD needs to come out first, and only the bare drive travels — taking drives out of machines is not something we do here. Storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, one or two very thin laptops) is the single thing beyond us: if it will not come out, it cannot come in.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. From Norwich it is about an hour and twenty down the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 — or next working day by tracked post. You hear from us as soon as it is booked onto the bench.
Unsure what to put in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or run the free online diagnostic.
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