How to recover data from a failed NAS?

If your NAS device is damaged, you first need to find out what is the reason. The cause of damage may be related to:

  • NAS box,
  • disks,
  • file system or RAID driver error,
  • network interface.

If the NAS box is physically damaged, take it to a repair service. You do not need to send the NAS to the repair lab along with the disks, because if the disks are in good condition, you can easily recover the data. Be careful when your NAS is being repaired and you want to put the disks back in it in the hope that everything will work as before. Unfortunately, very often after resetting the NAS settings, the device starts to recreate the array deleting everything that was previously stored there. Be sure to create disk image files of the disks before returning them to the NAS.

If you are dealing with a disk failure, for example, you hear clicking noise, repeated spin up and spin down sounds, your actions depend on the RAID level used in your NAS device and how many disks have failed. If you had a 3-disk NAS and only one disk failed, you just need to identify and exclude the damaged disk from the recovery process. If there are more failed disks than the redundancy allows, you need to contact a hard drive repair service.

If the NAS has a logical damage, you can try to recover files using a special NAS data recovery software ReclaiMe File Recovery.

Here are the steps you should follow:

  1. Turn off the NAS. Pull all the disks out and connect them to a PC. It is better to connect the drives directly to a motherboard via SATA cables. If there are not enough SATA ports, use USB-to-SATA adapters. Connecting drives directly to a motherboard is the most preferrable and reliable option for a data recovery from a NAS.
  2. Download and install ReclaiMe File Recovery software.
  3. Choose your NAS volume in the list of available devices. Most likely your volume will be under one of these sections: Linux md-raid, Linux LVM or BTRFS. Click the Start button to launch the filesystem scan.
  4. Check the data recovery result in the Preview window.
  5. If the data looks good, purchase a license key and copy your files to an external drive(s) or another NAS device.

If ReclaiMe File Recovery software doesn't display the NAS volume, most likely you are dealing with a RAID array failure. In this case, first you need to recover the RAID configuration using a special software like ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery. More detailed information about the RAID recovery you can find on this page.

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