The quiet box on the shelf held the company files and the family archive, until a drive dropped out, a rebuild froze partway or the enclosure died overnight. Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Buffalo, Netgear: crashed volumes from Malmesbury to Chippenham are rebuilt on this bench, drives first, and the enclosure only when the drives won't come out.
A free diagnostic on every NAS job. One fixed quote, in writing, before any work starts.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic and mechanical failures and chip-level work are 50% upfront, with the balance only if we recover your data, while BitLocker, ransomware, DVR and forensic jobs are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. You'll find full pricing on the data recovery cost page.
Every NAS job begins by matching the symptoms to the fault, and these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Survivable by design, and at the same moment your array is one hiccup away from disaster.
Rebuild stress finishes off a tired surviving drive: the single most common NAS catastrophe this bench sees.
Array logic broken, data still present, dashboard bright red: this is reconstruction territory, not restore territory.
One helpful-looking wizard click erases the configuration, and occasionally makes a start on the data itself.
Firmware dies mid-flash and leaves a healthy array stranded inside an unresponsive box.
Interrupted parity writes push the members out of step, and the volume refuses to mount.
The enclosure electronics fail while the drives are untouched, and member images then bring the array back virtually.
Deleted folders and snapshots can be carved back while their blocks remain unclaimed.
Boxes exposed to the internet get encrypted like any PC, but the snapshots beneath the shares often escape the sweep.
Drives pulled out and slotted back in from memory: still solvable, as long as the experimenting stops now.
Synology's flexible layering corrupts after hard shutdowns, and it is untangled from full images one layer at a time.
These are the DiskStations Wiltshire actually buys, and their crashed pools are rebuilt from imaged members on this bench every week.
QNAP's flexible volumes give way when a member dies mid-write, and they are remounted virtually once every drive has been imaged.
A WD single-bay unit bricked mid-update still holds a perfectly good Linux-formatted disk, which we mount natively here.
Buffalo units lose their array definition, so the layout is worked out again from the member disks themselves.
My Cloud PR4100 bays get swapped during cleaning or in a panic. The true drive order is recovered from the array metadata, but numbering the caddies first is far safer.
Same-batch IronWolfs age together; when the first 8TB member fails, its shelf-mates are rarely far behind, so image everything now.
Swapping in a bigger drive partway through an expansion leaves the pool half-grown and unmountable; it is rebuilt from the images in expansion order.
WD Red members drop out of the set while in error recovery, yet the drive still images cleanly on hardware built to wait for it.
A NAS shut away in an airless cabinet runs its drives hot for years, and they then fail within weeks of each other, which is exactly the moment to stop and image.
A NAS spreads your files across its drives using RAID or a vendor variant (SHR on Synology, BeyondRAID on Drobo), and the margin is thin: one failure can be absorbed, yet the rebuild that follows is exactly when a second ageing drive gives up. Our method keeps your originals completely out of danger. Every member is imaged in full; the order, stripe and offsets are then worked out from those images, and the volume is assembled virtually before a single file is copied. Nothing is ever written back to your disks.
Don't press the rebuild button. The wizard makes re-initialising look helpful, but it is the most destructive click on the dashboard. Power down cleanly, take out each caddy and number every drive as it comes out; the order matters enormously at reconstruction time, whether it's a two-bay DiskStation or a four-bay My Cloud PR4100. Get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, then post the numbered drives and keep the enclosure. Single-drive units just need the shell opened and the bare disk sent; call before forcing one that won't open, and if the drives won't come out, send the NAS itself.
NAS recovery is RAID work with a manufacturer's accent, and this bench speaks the dialects:
We image all of the member drives at the same time on dedicated hardware before analysing anything. Once that's done, the original drives never take part in any rebuild.
Works on the images to establish member order, stripe size, rotation and offsets, then mounts the assembled array virtually.
When one member of the array fails, it gets the full hard-drive treatment (heads, firmware and electronics) so that it can be imaged alongside the healthy ones.
The solved geometry is confirmed with entropy and parity checks before a single file is lifted from the assembled volume.
BeyondRAID, SHR, QNAP's flexible volumes, mdadm and LVM, btrfs and ext4: each manufacturer has its own private layering, and we decode those layers back into plain files.
One-drive units in the My Cloud style are opened cleanly, and because their disks are Linux-formatted they mount natively for extraction.
The DS220+ and DS923+ DiskStations, along with QNAP's TS-253D, are the boxes that homes and offices round here actually run, so they're the pools this bench rebuilds most often. Drobo's shutdown left every BeyondRAID box orphaned, and they can now only be read at lab level. The question PR4100 owners ask most is about drive order: the answer is stored in the array's own metadata, but writing the bay numbers on the caddies before anything is moved makes the whole job safer. Whatever the name on the box, power it down, number the drives, get a quote first by phone or with the free online diagnostic, then post us the drives and keep the box (unless the drives won't come out, in which case the box comes too).
DSM's flexibility is really a stack with a friendly face: SHR blends mismatched capacities into one pool, with mdadm and LVM underneath and btrfs or ext4 on top. That's why a DS220+ or DS923+ reporting 'volume crashed' looks like pure chaos to generic software. This bench works through the stack in order, starting from full images of every member: the SHR arrangement is worked out, the file system is mounted virtually, and the shared folders are copied out cleanly. Everything from two-bay home units up to RackStations follows the same route, whatever mix of drive sizes they held.
X-RAID quietly reshapes a ReadyNAS volume at every capacity upgrade, leaving expansion zones stacked like layers of rock that ordinary tools misread as damage. We reassemble the zones in the order they were created and mount the result just as the box itself would have. The budget D-Link and Netgear single-bay units set a simpler trap: their disks use ext4 or XFS, which Windows sees as a blank drive and offers to format. Don't: the shares are still there in full, and ext4 and XFS mount natively on this bench.
Get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic. Then shut the unit down cleanly and take the drives out one at a time, writing each bay number (1, 2, 3 and so on) directly on the drive before anything goes in the box. Array order is everything when it comes to the rebuild, and that goes for PR4100 owners in particular. The drives travel to us and the enclosure stays at home, unless the drives won't come out, as with a sealed single-bay unit you can't open.
Most customers get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and then 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 (from a server, every disk, each labelled with its bay), as we don't offer a drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (for example T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll ring you as soon as we've diagnosed your media.
Not sure what to send? Ring 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.