The little box in the corner held everything — company files, the family archive, the lot — right up until a drive dropped out, a rebuild stalled at 40%, or the enclosure died overnight. Whether it's a Synology or QNAP, a WD My Cloud, a Buffalo or a Netgear, crashed volumes from across South Wales are rebuilt on this bench.
Free diagnostic on every nas external drive job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every nas external drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Survivable by design — and the exact moment the array becomes one failure from disaster.
The rebuild's extra load kills a tired survivor: the classic NAS catastrophe on this bench.
Array logic broken, data intact, dashboard scarlet — reconstruction territory.
The setup assistant cheerfully wipes the configuration — and sometimes makes a start on the data.
Firmware dies mid-flash, stranding a healthy array inside a dead box.
Interrupted parity writes knock the members out of step; the volume then refuses to mount.
PSU or board failure with untouched drives — the array is rebuilt virtually from the members.
Removed data and snapshots carve back while their space lasts.
Internet-facing boxes get encrypted like PCs; the snapshots beneath often survive the sweep.
Drives pulled and re-slotted blind — solvable, provided the guessing stops now.
Synology's flexible layout corrupts after hard shutdowns — solved layer by layer from the images.
The most common Synology bays in local homes and offices — their pools rebuild from imaged members.
QNAP's flex volumes drop when a member fails mid-write — remounted virtually after imaging.
WD single-bays brick on updates with a healthy Linux-formatted drive inside — read natively at the bench.
Buffalo rack and desktop units drop their array definition; we work the layout back out from the member disks themselves.
A NAS stripes your data across its drives in RAID or a vendor twist on it — Synology's SHR, Drobo's BeyondRAID — and the arithmetic only tolerates so much: one dead drive is survivable, but the rebuild that follows is precisely when a second, tired drive lets go. Our process never touches your originals: each member is imaged in full, the array's order, block size and offsets are derived from the images, and the volume is remounted virtually before a single file is copied out.
Shut the unit down and step away from the rebuild button — wizards make re-initialising look helpful, and it's the most destructive click available. Pull the drives, mark each with its bay number (1, 2, 3…), and post the labelled drives while the enclosure stays home. Single-drive units like a My Cloud just need the case opened and the bare drive sent; if yours won't open without a fight, call 0800 689 0668 before forcing it.
NAS work is RAID recovery with a vendor dialect on top, and the bench speaks both:
Member drives image simultaneously on dedicated hardware before analysis starts — no original ever rejoins a rebuild.
Runs against the images to crack the geometry — order of members, block size, rotation, offsets — then mounts the whole array virtually.
Failed members get the full hard-drive treatment first (heads, firmware, electronics) so they can be imaged alongside the healthy ones.
Parity and entropy checks confirm the solved geometry before the file system is extracted from the assembled volume.
SHR, BeyondRAID, QNAP flex volumes, mdadm/LVM, btrfs and ext4 — every vendor's private layering decoded back into ordinary files.
One-drive units in the My Cloud mould are opened without drama and their Linux-formatted disks mounted directly.
DS220+ and DS923+ DiskStations and QNAP's TS-253D are the boxes South Wales actually buys, so they're the crashed pools we rebuild most — and Drobo's collapse has turned every BeyondRAID unit into an orphan only a lab can still read. Whatever the badge: power down, write the bay order on the drives, and send the drives, not the box.
DSM's famous flexibility is built from layers — SHR blending mismatched drive sizes into one pool, mdadm and LVM underneath, btrfs or ext4 on top — so when a DS220+ or DS923+ declares its pool crashed, generic recovery software sees only the wreckage of the whole stack. We solve it from the bottom up using full images of every member: derive the SHR arrangement, remount the file system virtually, and copy the shared folders out clean. Two-bay home DiskStations through five-bay units and RackStations all follow the identical route, whatever mixture of drive sizes they carried.
X-RAID quietly reshapes a ReadyNAS volume with every capacity upgrade, stacking expansion zone upon expansion zone until generic software sees pure chaos; we reconstruct those zones in creation order and bring the volume up just as the box itself would have. Down at the budget end, small D-Link and Netgear units set a simpler trap: their disks wear Linux formats — ext4 or XFS — that Windows shrugs at, so a perfectly healthy drive shows as blank in a PC and the machine helpfully offers to format it. Say no: every share is still there, and this bench mounts those file systems natively.
Shut the NAS down cleanly, pull each drive and write its bay number on it (1, 2, 3…) before boxing — array order is everything at rebuild time. The drives travel; the enclosure doesn't, unless it's a sealed single-bay unit you can't open.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Bristol Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.