Devices · NAS boxes
Nobody plans it, but the box bought for backups ends up holding the only version of a family's or a firm's files. Once a volume degrades, every well-meaning option the NAS offers — repair, scrub, rebuild — is what finishes the data off. Switch it off instead.
Speak to an engineer about it
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| The wording | What that tells you | First step |
|---|---|---|
| Synology: Volume Crashed | More members are gone than the volume could cover | Switch it off; skip DSM's repair |
| Synology: Storage Pool Degraded | One disk is on the way out; the pool still mounts | Risk climbs with every hour it runs |
| QNAP: RAID unmounted / system volume not active | The enclosure cannot put the array together any more | Reassembly off the box |
| WARNING: Your files have been locked by DeadBolt | Ransomware: every file now ends .deadbolt | Take a photo of it; no restart |
| Buffalo E14: The RAID array cannot be mounted | LinkStation/TeraStation cannot assemble its array | Record the code, power off |
| Buffalo E16: Unable to find the hard drive | One disk has dropped out or died | Disks normally still hold it all |
| Buffalo E30: The hard drive may be damaged | The box has kicked one disk out | Resist the urge to rebuild |
As soon as it lands with us, your device gets its own case number. An engineer works out the fault, says what can genuinely be pulled off, then puts one fixed price in writing — no charge for diagnosis, no obligation, and no chargeable work until you approve it.
Each disk is copied read-only, weak sectors included, so the box is never handed the chance to pick a damaging rebuild back up.
SHR cuts drives of unequal size into matching regions, lays an array over each and joins them with LVM; QNAP and the others each have their own stack. Those layers are reassembled in software, in the right order.
On top of that reconstruction the ext4 or btrfs volume is put right, shares and folder trees come back, and the lot is checked against a listing you sign off.
You sign off a complete list of the recovered files first; only then does the recovery fee fall due. Everything returns on fresh media, postage paid, and the job stays open until you confirm the files open at your end.
One campaign made the case: on 25 January 2022 DeadBolt began locking QNAP boxes that sat open to the internet; roughly 3,700 were counted in that first sweep, and further waves followed through the year, QLocker and eCh0raix having gone before it. Each victim was a NAS reachable from outside on unpatched firmware.
A two-bay box showing two red lights, then a home-made rebuild that wrote over its own metadata. Each disk was imaged through its bad sectors, the mirror rebuilt region by region from whichever image held the cleanest copy, and the shared volume returned intact.
No. Everything that defines the array sits on the disks themselves; the enclosure only reads it. A failed box with sound drives is among the happier jobs we see.
Yes — send the whole NAS if you like; with servers we'd rather have just the drives, labelled. Do whichever suits you, because either way imaging the disks comes first.
Synology Hybrid RAID splits drives of differing sizes into equal regions, builds a separate array over each set, then binds them with LVM — so a single volume can rest on layered arrays. Unwinding that in the correct order is the whole job.
That is the enclosure failing, not your data disappearing. Rebuilding from drive images regularly restores volumes the NAS had already written off.
Powering a damaged device up again costs you data. Start a case first; diagnosis is free whatever you decide.