Devices · storage boxes on the network
Turn it off, and keep it turned off. This one instruction will save many more of these jobs than all our other advice. The failure is quiet: shares continue to mount, files continue to open, and a bay may have failed a fortnight ago without anyone noticing. A pool is finished when someone accepts the offer of a scrub, repair or rebuild. Work on an array or NAS begins at £500 + VAT, and the look that settles the price is free. Boxes come to us from a distribution centre at Manton Wood, a Newark-on-Trent solicitor's office, a fabrication workshop on Sheepbridge, and a small cupboard under the stairs in Arnold, Nottingham.
Ask an engineer and the first look is free
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| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Synology says Volume Crashed | More disks down than the parity can cover | Power it off before DSM offers to mend anything |
| Synology says Storage Pool Degraded | One of your drives has dropped out, but everything above it carries on as normal | Each hour it stays powered costs you something |
| QNAP says system volume not active, RAID unmounted | QTS can no longer mount the volume it built | Reassemble it somewhere other than the box |
| A DeadBolt notice reading WARNING: Your files have been locked | Ransomware, and every file now carries a .deadbolt ending | Photograph what is on screen and alter nothing |
| Buffalo TeraStation E14: the array will not mount | Nothing wrong with the array; the box just will not bring it up | Note the E-number down, then unplug |
| Buffalo TeraStation E16: no hard disk found | That disk has stopped, or else the box cannot see it any more | Whatever it holds is usually still on it |
| Buffalo TeraStation E30: a disk the box says may be broken | One disk has been put out of the set | Say no to the rebuild |
Your case number is assigned when the item is received. Then an engineer works out what went wrong (no charge). At this point, you receive a basic summary of which parts are recoverable and which are not. You also receive a single written quote for the price of the recovery. Accept the quoted price or turn it down, and there is no obligation to pay anything.
Imaging equipment built specifically for the task copies each disk end to end (good data and bad). Once that copying is finished, the copied images do all of the work. Your box stays turned off the whole time, so it will never resume anything it was doing before.
Most volumes consist of several layers. Synology pairs partitions, puts an md array over each pair and uses LVM to present the result as one volume. QNAP, Netgear and Buffalo do the same thing in their own ways. Working up from the disks, each layer is reconstructed in software.
After reconstructing those lower layers, the btrfs or ext4 volume above them can be fixed. Then all of your shares should show up with their original names and folder structure. No job is closed before you have seen the file listing.
A complete file list will be provided before any invoicing. Simply say "yes" or "no" to what we found: yes means it is billed, no means it is not, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. What we find is posted to you on media purchased specifically for your case, at no additional cost to you. We consider the process complete once you have opened those files yourself on your own computer.
What 2022 taught: approximately 3,700 QNAP devices were reachable from the public internet when DeadBolt's first wave hit that year, with more waves later. Before DeadBolt, QLocker and eCh0raix had targeted the same devices. Two things were true of every one of them: outside traffic could reach them, and their firmware hadn't been updated since the carton was opened.
At two red lights, the unit was still fully recoverable. The damage came when a rebuild was started after that, overwriting the metadata the NAS keeps for itself. Recovery needed a full copy of each disk, weak sectors included, and then the mirror was reassembled block by block from whichever disk still read each block cleanly. Every share opened just as it had before.
Rarely. The case holds none of this information. Each disk keeps its own record of the bay it sat in, the stripe size and every layer above. Good disks in a dead enclosure are among the simplest jobs that reach this bench.
If the disks can be removed, please send each one with a number showing which bay it came from. If they cannot, send us the entire unit as it is: casing, power supply and the disks still in their bays. Get a quote first and insure the parcel. We don't look at any files until we have an image of every disk.
Synology developed SHR to handle disks of different sizes. Rather than waste the extra capacity, it divides each disk into partitions that match partitions on the other disks, builds an md array across each matching set, then passes everything to LVM, which presents the single volume you see. Recovery means finding every one of those layers and putting them back in order, starting from the partitions.
No. Volume Crashed describes something the NAS can no longer do; it says nothing at all about your data. With an image of every disk and the pool rebuilt in software on separate hardware, a volume DSM won't mount usually reads right through.
The look costs nothing. It gives you a file listing of what opened and what did not, along with the cost of finishing the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Do not switch the drive on until you have that listing.