Asustor RAID 5 Recovery

ASUSTOR was founded in 2011 and since then has occupied a strong position among the leading providers of technologies for storing large volumes of data. The Asustor manufacturer offers devices both for home use and for small and medium-sized businesses. It should also be noted that the company pays attention to the appearance of its devices; all of their models look very presentable and dignified. Until recently, devices from Asustor used the ext file system, but in order to keep up with the times, the company began to transfer its devices to the btrfs file system, which has a number of advantages:

  1. Copy-on-write.
  2. Checksums on data and metadata.
  3. Online data scrubbing.
  4. Built-in compression.

Possible failures of the Asustor device:

  1. Failure of the NAS itself.
  2. RAID configuration failure.
  3. File system failure.
  4. More disks fail than redundancy allows.

In all cases except the last one, you can try to recover the data yourself. In the case of RAID5, the device can remain operational with one missing disk. If two disks fail, then in order to get the data back, you need to repair at least one disk.

In short, the data recovery process boils down to removing the disks from the Asustor, connecting them to the computer and using special programs for data recovery. Each of these actions will be described in detail below.

How to recover data from Asustor RAID5

  1. Remove the drives from the Asustor device and connect them to the computer. It's always better to connect the drives directly to the motherboard. This will give you a faster recovery speed and a more stable connection. However, if there are not enough free ports, then use special USB-to-SATA adapters with power. Also note that in the case of RAID5, you can exclude one of the disks from the recovery process.
  2. Download and install ReclaiMe File Recovery.
  3. In the list of devices from ReclaiMe, find the volume from your Asustor. Pay attention to the volume size - if there are several volumes from the NAS device, choose the largest volume.
  4. Asustor volume for recovery
  5. Run a volume scan from Asustor NAS.
  6. Wait until you receive a message that Initial scan is completed and start checking the recovered data. If the data looks good in Preview and the size of the recovered data is as expected, you can stop scanning and start copying the recovered data to another storage location. Otherwise, continue scanning by clicking the Resume button.
  7. ReclaiMe software - file preview
  8. Since Asustor devices use the Linux file system – ext or btrfs, in order to copy the recovered data, you will need to buy an Ultimate license key.

If you don't see the Asustor volume in the ReclaiMe window or the recovered data is damaged, then most likely you are dealing with a broken RAID5 configuration. In this case, the data recovery process is somewhat complicated by the fact that before restoring the file system, you need to restore the parameters of the RAID5 array using another software - ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery.

How to recover data from Asustor RAID5

  1. Download and install ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery.
  2. Select all available drives from Asustor and click Start RAID5.
  3. QNAP RAID5 recovery
  4. Wait until the software determines all parameters from RAID5. Depending on the number of disks in the array, the size of the disks, the method of connecting the disks, and the specifics of the stored data, the recovery time can vary - from 15 minutes to tens of hours.
  5. When the software has restored the RAID5 array configuration, select Run ReclaiMe to recover files option.
  6. ReclaiMe File Recovery will open in RAID recovery mode. Run a reconstructed RAID scan.
  7. Check the recovery result, if the data is displayed correctly in Preview, buy an Ultimate license key and copy the data to another storage.

If you have followed all the steps described and are still not successful in recovering your data, do not hesitate to contact us for help. Technical support specialists will do everything possible to help you get your data back.

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