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NAS Data Recovery

Data Clinic recover data from all manuafacturers of NAS device including those made by:

Buffalo, DLink, G-RAID, LaCie, Lenovo, Netgear, QNAP Seagate, Synology, Thecus, WD (Western Digital)

Single and Multiple drive systems supported

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Call us on 0800 151 2207

NAS Data Recovery

Data Clinic’s Network Attached Storage Recovery Services

Data Clinic provide data recovery from all brands of NAS including those made by Synology, QNAP, Western Digital, Seagate, Buffalo and NetGear.

NAS is an abbreviation for for Network Attached Storage. A NAS device is an external hard disk drive that is attached to a network and allows users of that network to connect and access the data held on it. Think of it as a big external hard drive that anyone on a network can use. In it’s most basic form, a NAS is a single hard drive, but two and four drive models are common and use either RAID 0 (known as ‘striping’) or RAID 1 (known as ‘mirroring’).

Larger NAS boxes with 4 or more hard drives as often sound in a business environment and typically run in a RAID 5 configuration. NAS devices that run RAID 5 offer a degree of data redundancy – one of the drives in the NAS can fail completely without any loss of data, but a losing a second hard drive on a RAID 5 NAS will cause the entire NAS to fail and a data recovery service will be required.

For information about data recovery from larger RAID arrays and servers visit our RAID data recovery page.

Data Clinic’s NAS Data Recovery Process

Contact Us

0800 151 2207

Or fill in the Contact Form.

We will determine the nature of the problem and give an indication of recovery costs and timeframe.

Collection

We will arrange to have your device collected for free from any UK address.

Or you can all in at one of our UK locations and drop, Mon-Fri 9am-5pm

Diagnosis

Analysis of the problem begins in the lab.

The fault is understood and a recovery plan constructed along with an exact recovery cost.

Recovery

Once the recovery cost is approved, data recovery begins immediately.

The transfer time is dependent on how much data there is to recover.

Return

Your data is returned along with you faulty equipment using a secure point to point courier.

We will keep a copy of your data for 10 days.

Common NAS Failures

There are 3 main types of Network Attached Storage failure:

Multiple Hard Drive Failure in the NAS

Often the first time a hard drive breaks in a NAS it will go unnoticed because RAID 5 NAS devices are able to continue working with one failed drive. It’s the second drive failure that will cause the NAS to crash. To get the data back from a situation like this it’ll be necessary to recover the data from at least one of the failed hard drives in combination with the remaining working drive(s).

NAS Controller Failure

Sometimes the hardware that controls the NAS can actually fail. Recovering the data from NAS devices with such an error is not straightforward. It’s not a case of simply getting an identical NAS device and swapping the drives over as the disk order from controller to controller can vary and cause irreversible data loss, also modern NAS devices contain adaptive data that is unique to each NAS. Putting drives into a NAS with different adaptive data will result in data loss.

NAS Configuration Errors

NAS devices can loose their configuration settings which means they ‘forget’ how the drives they are writing and reading files and folders from are setup. Recovering a NAS with a config problem is a case of determining the correct configuration and re-writing it to the NAS. Again, this needs to be done right first time or it will result in irreversible data loss.

Recovering Files from Damaged RAID 5 NAS

It’s important to note that NAS drives that use RAID 5 (and that’s most of them comprising of three hard drives and more) do not write their files sequentially on just one disk – instead files are divided into blocks and distributed across all the hard drives in the NAS. Thus if a NAS breaks and it’s data is required, it’s not a simple case of taking each drive and searching for the files and folders required – the results will be garbage as the data has been divided and written across all the disks. It’s therefore essential that you use a NAS data recovery company like Data Clinic who are able to reconstruct the missing data from all the hard drives and piece the files and folders back together again. This is not a simple task and requires a high level of skill. If you have a broken NAS device that contains valuable data you need to recover, we strongly advise against doing anything yourself to attempt recovery as doing the wrong thing at this point will often destroy any chance of data recovery from the NAS. NAS data recovery is often possible in most circumstances. NAS boxes are just one or more hard drive that are chained together, enclosed in an external hard drive casing and connected to a network. These hard drives are normal hard drive as can fail in all the same ways as any other hard drive. The added complication with NAS storage is that making the wrong decision will often cause partial or complete data loss. Do not attempt data recovery yourself, unless of course the data is of no value and making a mistake doesn’t matter.