Devices · network storage
A NAS is the one device that carries on working while it fails: the shares still mount, the files still open, and so nobody stops. By the time the web interface is offering to rebuild, scrub or repair, those buttons have become the surest way to lose the volume. The most useful thing you can do is switch it off and leave it off, then send it in from Maidenhead whole, with the drives left in their bays.
Describe the fault to an engineer
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| The symptom | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Synology: Volume Crashed | Disk losses have overtaken what the parity covers | Cut the power before DSM begins repairs |
| Synology: Storage Pool Degraded | One member is failing while the shares still open | Each hour powered is ground lost |
| QNAP: system volume not active / RAID unmounted | The box cannot assemble its own volume | Assemble it elsewhere |
| DeadBolt — WARNING: Your files have been locked | Ransomware: .deadbolt appended to every filename | Photograph it; leave the power alone |
| Buffalo E14: Cannot mount the RAID array | A TeraStation or LinkStation unable to raise its array | Note the E-number, then cut the power |
| Buffalo E16: The hard disk was not found | A member has failed, or gone missing entirely | The data is nearly always still present |
| Buffalo E30: The hard disk may be broken | The unit has ejected a member | Leave the rebuild alone |
Nothing becomes chargeable until you have said yes to it. Each item takes a case number of its own the moment it arrives, an engineer establishes what has actually failed, and you are given a candid view of which files stand a realistic chance of returning. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down, and costs nothing.
Each drive is copied in full, difficult surfaces included, and all later work runs on those copies. The enclosure stays off, so the routine that caused the damage cannot repeat it.
A Synology volume is rarely one thing: equal slices taken off unequal disks, an array raised over each set of slices, LVM holding those arrays together. QNAP, Netgear and Buffalo each arrange it differently. Every tier goes back up in software, lowest first.
Once the stack stands, attention moves to what sits on it. A damaged btrfs or ext4 volume is mended, the shares and folders come back carrying their own names, and a full listing goes to you to check before the job is closed.
Nothing is billed until you have seen the recovered file list in full and told us to go ahead. What comes back arrives on new media, with the return journey at our cost, and the case stays open at this end until you have opened every file yourself.
The 2022 campaigns made the point plainly: DeadBolt's first sweep, on 25 January 2022, reached about 3,700 QNAP units that could be seen from the open internet, with more waves later in the year; eCh0raix and QLocker had already worked that same ground. The shared condition never varied — a box exposed to the internet, running firmware nobody had thought to update.
The two red lights were survivable; the rebuild attempted afterwards was not, since it overwrote the box's own metadata. Both disks were imaged straight through their bad sectors, and the mirror was reassembled from whichever copy read more cleanly at each point, until the shared volume was whole again.
Usually not. Member order, chunk size and the volume above are written on the drives; the chassis only reads them back. Healthy disks in a dead box make for predictable work.
Whichever suits you. A NAS can travel to the Guildford lab complete, drives still in their bays; with servers we would rather have the members alone, each marked with its bay. Imaging comes first either way.
Synology Hybrid RAID exists so that mismatched disks waste no capacity. It cuts every drive into partitions of a common size, raises an array over each matching set, then joins those arrays under LVM as one volume. Recovery is unpicking that stack in sequence.
That verdict is the enclosure's, not your data's. Imaged disk by disk and raised again in software, a volume DSM had given up on usually comes back whole.
Each further power-up asks more of a drive that has already begun to fail. Open the case first and let the free diagnosis tell you what is left.