A NAS is two things wearing one case: a small Linux computer, and the disks it babysits. When the volume crashes, the shares vanish or the status light turns an honest shade of red, it is almost always the babysitter that failed — and the single most damaging instinct is to make the box try harder. The data lives on the disks; the recovery happens off them.
Synology’s “volume crashed”, QNAP’s unmounted pools, Buffalo’s blinking error codes — behind the branding it’s the same anatomy: an mdadm array, often under LVM, holding an ext4 or btrfs file system, assembled at boot by firmware doing its best. One tired disk, a power cut mid-write or a botched firmware update, and the assembly fails even though most members are healthy. The files aren’t gone; the box has just lost the recipe for putting them together.
That recipe can be re-derived on the bench from the disks themselves — which is why the disks, not the box, are what we need.
Every NAS has a reset, and every support script eventually suggests it. On some models and moods, “reset” means re-initialise — new array, fresh file system, straight over your old one. The same goes for reinserting disks in a different order and accepting the “repair” the box then offers, and for firmware reinstalls that quietly rebuild storage. If the data matters, the correct amount of button-pressing is none.
Even a NAS that has been reset is usually recoverable — initialisation writes surprisingly little — but the odds are best when the box comes to us confused rather than convinced.
Two Synology-era details work in your favour. SHR’s mixed-size arrays are just layered standard RAID once you can read the layers — routine on the bench. And btrfs snapshots, where they were enabled, often survive events that flatten the live shares: an accidental deletion, a ransomware pass, a bad sync. Part of every NAS job here is checking for those nets before anyone mourns. Bring the disks in their bays if that’s easiest, or bare and unordered — the images sort the rest.
Multi-disk work starts at £500 + VAT and is quoted to the job, because every member disk is imaged individually before the array itself is touched — more disks, more careful hours. Every job starts with a free diagnostic and ends the same way it was quoted: the figure goes in writing before a single sector is read, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay unless your data comes back. No hourly meter, no surprise “evaluation fee”, no percentage of what the files are worth.
NAS work is not a Glasgow-only service: units arrive by insured post from across the UK every week, and everything is done in-house — no unit is ever shipped abroad or handed to a third party. If you want the failure modes in plain English first, the guides on a NAS that won’t give up its shares and on how each RAID level actually dies are free reading and cost you nothing but ten minutes.
Almost never. That message means the box could not assemble the array at boot — usually one weak disk or interrupted metadata — not that the data was destroyed. We image every drive, rebuild the SHR or RAID layout from the images and lift the files off the reconstruction. It is the most common NAS job we see, and one of the most recoverable.
Usually not — initialisation writes new, mostly-empty structures and touches a fraction of the disk surface. The old file system underneath is largely intact and can be found and reassembled from images. The critical thing is what happens next: no new files onto the box, no further setup steps, disks out and over to us.
Yes — and stop all writes to the NAS now, because a busy volume recycles freed space quickly. If btrfs snapshots were on, the folder may be minutes away from restoration; if not, it’s a deleted-file recovery against the imaged volume. Either way, the sooner the disks stop being written to, the more comes back.
Whichever is easier — the recovery only needs the disks, but the enclosure sometimes helps us confirm settings, and shipping drives in their caddies keeps them safe. Number the bays with a marker if you can; don’t worry if you can’t. Never post it with the drives loose in the chassis.
Yes — NAS drive data recovery runs UK-wide by insured post as well as by drop-off at Tay House. Post the unit as it stands, or the drives labelled by bay. Everything is done in-house and nothing leaves the UK.
Usually not. A crashed volume most often means one member disk has failed under a degraded array, and the data is still on the remaining disks — until a repair or rebuild writes over it. Power the unit down and leave the repair button alone.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from Paisley, Ayrshire, the Highlands or anywhere else in the UK. Either way the work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
And distance changes nothing: send the unit or the bare disks insured from anywhere as part of our UK-wide data recovery service — free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, and on most jobs no fee unless the volume comes back.
Unplug the box before it tries another repair, and get the drives to us over the counter at Charing Cross or by insured post. NAS data recovery for Glasgow — Synology, QNAP, Buffalo, WD — rebuilt from images, never from hope.