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 in the night. Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud, Buffalo, Netgear: crashed volumes from Malmesbury to Chippenham are reconstructed on this bench, drives first, enclosure never.
Free diagnostic on every nas external drive job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
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.
Every nas external drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Survivable by design — and simultaneously the moment your array is one hiccup from disaster.
Rebuild stress finishes off a tired survivor: the single most common NAS catastrophe this bench sees.
Array logic broken, data present, dashboard bright red — reconstruction territory, not restore territory.
One helpful-looking wizard click erases the configuration — and occasionally begins on the data itself.
Firmware dies mid-flash and strands a healthy array inside an unresponsive box.
Interrupted parity writes push the members out of step, and the volume declines to mount.
Enclosure electronics fail with the drives untouched — member images then bring the array back virtually.
Removed folders and snapshots carve back while their blocks stay unclaimed.
Internet-facing boxes get encrypted like any PC; the snapshots below the shares often dodge the sweep.
Drives pulled and re-slotted from memory — solvable, provided the experimenting stops right now.
Synology's flexible layering corrupts after hard shutdowns — untangled from full images, layer by layer.
The DiskStations Wiltshire actually buys; their crashed pools rebuild from imaged members on this bench weekly.
QNAP's flexible volumes let go when a member dies mid-write — remounted virtually once every drive is imaged.
A WD single-bay bricked mid-update still holds a perfectly good Linux-formatted disk — mounted natively here.
Buffalo units drop their array definition; the layout is deduced again from the member disks themselves.
My Cloud PR4100 bays swapped during cleaning or panic — the true drive order is recovered from array metadata, but numbering the caddies first is far safer.
Same-batch IronWolfs age in formation; when the first 8TB member goes, its shelf-mates are rarely far behind — image everything now.
A bigger-drive swap mid-way through expansion leaves the pool half-grown and unmountable — reconstructed from the images in expansion order.
WD Red members time out of the set under error recovery; the drive still images cleanly on hardware built to wait for it.
A NAS shut in an airless cabinet runs its drives hot for years — they then fail within weeks of each other, which is exactly when to stop and image.
A NAS spreads your files across its drives using RAID or a vendor variation — SHR on Synology, BeyondRAID on Drobo — and the tolerance is thin: one failure can be absorbed, yet the rebuild afterwards is exactly the moment a second elderly drive lets go. Our method keeps your originals out of danger entirely. Every member gets a complete image; order, stripe and offsets are then worked out from those captures, and the volume is stood up virtually before one file is copied. Nothing writes back to your disks, ever.
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 at reconstruction time, whether it's a two-bay DiskStation or a four-bay My Cloud PR4100. 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.
NAS recovery is RAID work with a vendor accent, and this bench speaks the dialects:
Every member drive is captured simultaneously on dedicated hardware before analysis — originals never rejoin any rebuild.
Works on the images to solve member order, stripe size, rotation and offsets, then mounts the assembled array virtually.
A failed member gets full hard-drive treatment — heads, firmware, electronics — so it can be imaged alongside the healthy ones.
Entropy and parity checks prove the solved geometry before a single file is lifted from the assembled volume.
BeyondRAID, SHR, QNAP's flexible volumes, mdadm and LVM, btrfs, ext4 — each maker's private layering decoded back to plain files.
My Cloud-style one-drive units opened cleanly and their Linux-formatted disks mounted natively for extraction.
DS220+ and DS923+ DiskStations plus QNAP's TS-253D are the boxes local homes and offices really run, so they're the pools this bench rebuilds most — and Drobo's shutdown left every BeyondRAID box orphaned, readable now only at lab level. The question PR4100 owners ask most is drive order: the answer is written in the array's own metadata, but write bay numbers on the caddies before anything moves and the whole job gets safer. Whatever the badge — power down, number the drives, post the drives, keep the box.
DSM's flexibility is a stack wearing a friendly face — SHR blending mismatched capacities into one pool, mdadm and LVM below, btrfs or ext4 on top — which is why a DS220+ or DS923+ declaring 'volume crashed' reads as pure chaos to generic software. This bench solves the stack in order, from full images of every member: the SHR arrangement is derived, the file system mounted virtually, and the shared folders copied out clean. Two-bay home units through RackStations follow one identical route, whatever jumble of drive sizes they carried.
X-RAID reshapes a ReadyNAS volume silently at every capacity upgrade, leaving expansion zones stacked like geological strata that ordinary tools misread as damage; the zones get reassembled in creation sequence and the result mounted just as the box itself would have. The budget D-Link and Netgear singles set a plainer trap — their disks wear ext4 or XFS, which Windows greets as a blank drive and offers to format. Refuse: the shares are sitting there whole, and ext4 and XFS mount natively on this bench.
Shut the unit down cleanly, then pull the drives one by one, writing each bay number straight onto the drive — 1, 2, 3 and so on — before anything is boxed. Array order is everything at rebuild time, PR4100 owners especially. The drives travel; the enclosure stays home unless it's a sealed single-bay you can't open.
Most customers 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 — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
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