If your NAS or RAID has just failed: don't start a rebuild, don't initialise or reset the unit, and don't swap drives between bays. Power it down, label each drive with its bay number and call us. A rebuild on a weak drive is the most common way a recoverable array becomes unrecoverable.
Systems we recover
- Synology DiskStation and RackStation: SHR, SHR-2 and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 volumes, formatted Btrfs or ext4.
- QNAP Turbo NAS: QTS storage pools (ext4) and QuTS hero pools (ZFS), RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10.
- Promise Pegasus, Pegasus2, Pegasus3 and Pegasus32 Thunderbolt RAIDs, and VTrak systems. These use hardware RAID controllers, so a dead enclosure doesn't mean lost data.
- G-Technology (now SanDisk Professional) G-RAID, G-RAID Shuttle and G-SPEED Shuttle, used widely for video and photo work on Macs.
- LaCie 2big, 5big, 6big and 12big Thunderbolt and USB-C RAIDs.
- Drobo 5D, 5D3, 5N, 8D and others. Drobo's BeyondRAID layout is proprietary, and with the manufacturer no longer supporting these units, recovery is often the only way to the files.
- OWC ThunderBay with SoftRAID, RAID sets created in macOS Disk Utility, and internal RAID in 2006–2012 Mac Pro towers.
Find your NAS or RAID by brand and model: 766 models from 23 brands, with how recovery works for each and what it costs.
Common failures
Degraded, then crashed. One drive fails, the array keeps running, and a second drive fails during the rebuild. RAID 5 can't survive two failures, but the data is usually still recoverable from the remaining drives.
The enclosure or controller died. Promise Pegasus and G-RAID units often fail at the power supply or controller board while the drives are healthy. We read the drives directly.
Volume crashed after an update or power cut. Synology shows "Crashed" and QNAP shows the storage pool as "Not active". The drives may be fine, with damage only to the RAID metadata or file system.
Accidentally reset or reinitialised. A factory reset or new storage pool overwrites the volume structure, not all of the data. Stop using the unit straight away.
Ransomware on a NAS
Internet-connected NAS units have been targeted by ransomware such as DeadBolt and eCh0raix, which encrypt shared folders. Unplug the NAS from the network, don't reset it, and call us. We check whether snapshots, unencrypted copies or recoverable earlier versions survive. We'll tell you honestly if they don't.
How we recover a RAID
- We image every drive in the array separately, using the clean room for any that have physically failed. Your original drives are never written to.
- We work out the RAID layout from the images: drive order, stripe size, parity rotation and offsets, including Synology SHR and Drobo BeyondRAID.
- We rebuild the array virtually and mount the volume read-only, whether it's Btrfs, ext4, ZFS, APFS, HFS+ or NTFS.
- Your files are copied to a new drive and checked before you collect them.
What to bring
- Every drive from the array, labelled with its bay number, or the whole NAS or enclosure
- The admin password, and any encryption key or password for encrypted shared folders or volumes
- A note of the RAID type, if you know it, and what happened just before the failure
NAS and RAID recovery is priced from £750 + VAT, depending on the number of drives and the damage. You get a fixed quote after the free inspection. Work out your price.