NAS recovery

Rise of NAS

Over the past decade, Network Attached Storage became more and more popular. As a rule, NAS devices can be easily installed and also they do not require maintenance. That's why NASes are often chosen instead of DIY or ready-made entry level servers. On the other hand, all the simplicity in installing and operating leads to the following - should the NAS fail, then most likely there will be noone nearby who could repair it. However, despite the apparent complexity, there are several tricks you can try to recover NAS without undue risk.

NAS recovery options

Generally, if your NAS has failed you have two options:

• consider automatic NAS recovery,
• or try to re-assemble the internal RAID in the Linux environment.

The route of automatic NAS recovery is simple, not requiring special skills and knowledge, and, most importantly, safe because you use read-only NAS recovery software which doesn't change NAS metadata. More than that, you can try different NAS recovery tools to see which brings more data or even send the disk set to a lab as a last resort. The only "drawback" is that for automatic NAS recovery you have to prepare free disk space equal the capacity of the data recovered from the NAS, because NAS recovery software gives you a reconstructed RAID, data from which you should then copy to the prepared disk space. Read more on automatic NAS data recovery.

Reassembling should be applied only to cases not involving disk failure, for example, when all the hardware works normally but there's something wrong with RAID metadata. In this case, manual NAS recovery boils down to applying specific commands forcing the Linux RAID driver to reassemble the RAID. Be aware that NAS metadata is actually altered during reassembly and any incorrect action may lead to the irreversible data loss. Read more about manual NAS reassembling.