QNAP Virtualization Station Recovery

QNAP can be used to create and store virtual machine image files. You can create both Windows and Linux virtual machines using the built-in QNAP Virtualization Station application. The virtual machine image files will be stored on QNAP storage, which is usually organized like this:

  1. Disks inserted into QNAP are organized into RAID storage. Typically, RAID5 is used, which is created using the MD driver.
  2. Multiple volumes are created on the RAID array using the Linux LVM driver.
  3. QNAP volumes are then built on top of LVM volumes; data on the QNAP volume is not stored in a traditional sector-by-sector manner. Instead, it is organized according to a specific scheme based on a cluster map, which provides an additional layer of abstraction and flexibility in managing storage.
  4. The QNAP volume is formatted into the Linux ext file system. This ext volume stores virtual machine image files.
    5. QNAP virtualization
  5. Virtual machine image files are not simply sector-by-sector copies of virtual machine volumes, but rather a specific format that stores both metadata and user data. This means that attempting to recover data from an image file using a traditional data recovery program will be unsuccessful. Instead, it is necessary to further disassemble and restore this format in order to extract the stored virtual machine images from QNAP devices.

As you can see, in order to get to the data stored on virtual machines created using QNAP Virtualization Station, you need to successfully restore all the stages described. If you just have a case of data recovery from QNAP Virtualization Station, then contact our technical support for help.

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