A mirror that lost both disks, resynced the wrong way or died inside its NAS enclosure hasn't necessarily lost your data. We image each member separately and rebuild the file system from the strongest copy — originals untouched.
Every RAID case starts with a free diagnostic. From £500 + VAT priced per disk, one written quote before work begins, and logical rebuilds carry no fix, no fee.
Two copies ought to be safe — yet paired wear, dead enclosures and wrong-way rebuilds still bring mirrors to our bench.
Mirror members are usually bought together, spun up together and worn out together. The same heat, surge or age that finishes one is well placed to finish the other within days.
On a two-bay NAS or mirrored external, the bridge board or controller often fails first. Both disks may be perfectly well — but the volume stays locked until they are read directly and reassembled.
Replace the wrong member — or let the box decide badly — and the empty or stale disk is copied over the good one, erasing precisely the files the mirror existed to protect.
A mirror that has run degraded first on one disk and later on the other holds two diverging versions of your data. Combined carelessly they corrupt; separated properly, both can contribute.
Deletion, corruption, ransomware, a botched update — the mirror copies each one to both members instantly. Duplication is no protection against logical damage.
Failed firmware or an operating-system fault on the NAS itself can seal off a perfectly healthy pair of disks until both are imaged and the volume reconstructed elsewhere.
A mirror is handled as two individual disks from the start. Both members are cloned with hardware imagers — after clean-room repair of any physically failed drive — and the images are compared to establish which holds the more complete, more recent data. The file system is rebuilt from the stronger copy, drawing on the other where it fills gaps, and your files are extracted without a single write to the originals.
The mirror's one promise is surviving a single dead disk. Everything else passes straight through: deletions and corruption are duplicated the instant they happen, ransomware encrypts both halves at once, and a failed enclosure removes access to the pair together. That is why a broken mirror is a genuine recovery job — and why the only real backup is a copy that lives on separate media somewhere else.
The mirrors we recover mostly come out of two-bay Synology, QNAP and Netgear units and small office servers, sent in from homes and businesses across Swansea, Neath, Port Talbot, Bridgend and Carmarthen. Post or courier both disks to our Bristol location — and see our RAID recovery and NAS recovery services, with pricing on the data recovery cost page.
Send the pair and we'll rebuild from the stronger copy — free diagnostic and a fixed written quote first.
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.