NAS failure

Like any other data sotrage device, Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are affected by failures of various nature. For a user, it means impossibility to access important data stored on the NAS device.

Main reasons of NAS device failure

The principal components of a NAS device are RAID controller, several hard drives, its own operating system and network interface that is responsible for the data transfer via local network. Any of these components may fail resutling in losing access to the NAS data. The most common reasons of NAS failure are:

  • logical or physical disk failure,
  • failure of a built-in operating system or a file system,
  • network interface failure.

If your NAS has broken, do not try to rebuild it. Functions named "Rebuild", "Restore", etc. usually reinitialize an internal RAID array or do something similar. As soon as the rebuild is finished, you get a perfectly working but absolutely empty NAS volume.

You can find more information about typical NAS failures on the page – NAS drive recovery.

How to access the NAS data

  1. To recover data from the failed NAS, first you need to extract the drives from the NAS box. Read here to know why it is necessary and how to do this correctly.
  2. Connect the NAS drives to a PC running Windows. Direct connection via SATA cables is a preferable option, but if your motherboard lacks SATA ports, you can use USB-to-SATA cables.
  3. Download, install and run special NAS recovery software - ReclaiMe File Recovery.
  4. Select the NAS volume from the list of available devices for recovery. Your volume will probably be located under one of the following sections: Linux md-raid, Linux LVM, or BTRFS section.
    5. Selecting a NAS volume for recovery
  5. Wait till the end of scanning and check the recovery quality using the Preview function.
  6. If you are satisfied with the recovery, purchase a license key and copy the data to a storage device prepared in advance.
IMPORTANT NOTE:

if you haven’t found your NAS volume in the device list displayed by ReclaiMe, your RAID configuration is probably severely damaged. Before starting the NAS recovery, you need to recover the array configuration parameters using ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery software.


If you lost data after factory reset, please visit this page.

Still have questions?