Devices · networked storage units
NAS failures are quiet. Shares carry on mounting, files carry on opening, and bay three can sit failed for a fortnight without anyone noticing. What does the damage is the next move: DSM or QTS offers a scrub, a repair or a rebuild, somebody agrees, and the pool goes. Switch the box off and leave it off. Ours reach the Reading bench from a distribution office at Theale, a Thatcham solicitor, a fabrication shop on the Woodley estates and a cupboard in a Caversham house. NAS and array work starts at £500 + VAT, and the look that decides it is free.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Synology: Volume Crashed | More disks gone than the parity can carry | Switch it off before DSM offers to fix anything |
| Synology: Storage Pool Degraded | A disk has dropped out and the layers above carry on regardless | Every hour it stays powered costs you |
| QNAP: system volume inactive; RAID will not mount | The volume QTS created will no longer mount | Put it back together away from the box |
| DeadBolt — WARNING: Your files have been locked | Ransomware: each file now carries a .deadbolt suffix | Photograph the message, change nothing |
| E14 on a Buffalo TeraStation: the array will not mount | The array is fine; the box will not bring it up | Jot the E-number down, then unplug |
| E16 on a Buffalo TeraStation: no hard disk found | Either the disk has failed or the box has lost sight of it | What is on it is usually still there |
| E30 on a Buffalo TeraStation: a disk it says may be broken | One disk has been thrown out of the set | Decline the rebuild |
A case number goes on your device the day it reaches us, and an engineer then finds the real fault — free, and before anything else happens. You are told plainly what will come back and what will not, with one fixed figure in writing beside it. Nothing chargeable starts until you have read that and said yes.
Each disk is cloned end to end on imaging hardware made for the job, weak regions included. After that, every operation runs on the copies. The box itself stays powered off here, so it never resumes what it was doing.
One volume is nearly always several layers deep. On a Synology, partitions are paired off, an md array sits over each pair and LVM presents the result; QNAP, Netgear and Buffalo each arrange their own version of the same idea. Every layer is reconstructed in software, working up from the disks.
Once those layers are standing, the btrfs or ext4 volume on top is repaired. Every share reappears with the name you gave it and the folder tree you left behind. Nothing is signed off until the file listing has been to you to read.
You see the file list first, then decide. Nothing is invoiced until you have said yes, and on most jobs there is no fee at all if the data does not come back. What we pull off goes onto media bought in for your job, and the postage home is ours. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
What 2022 taught: on 25 January 2022 DeadBolt's first wave found close to five thousand QNAP units answering from the public internet, and it was not the last wave that year. eCh0raix and QLocker had worked the same ground before it. Everyone who lost data had the same two things: a box reachable from outside, and firmware nobody had touched since the carton.
Two red lights, and the box was still recoverable at that point. The rebuild someone started next is what did the damage, writing over the unit's own metadata. Both disks were then copied in full, weak sectors included, and the mirror was put back together block by block — each one taken from whichever disk still gave a clean read there. Every share opened as before.
Rarely. Each disk holds its own record of the volume: the bay it sat in, the stripe size, and every layer built above it. The chassis holds none of that. Sound disks inside a box that has failed are some of the least troublesome work we take in.
The whole unit. The lab's shipping form wants a NAS as it stands — chassis, disks still in their bays, power supply — and only a server or a RAID set has to travel as bare disks with each bay number written on. Already taken the disks out? Label them in bay order before you pack. Insure the parcel; nothing gets examined for files until an image of every disk exists.
SHR is Synology's answer to mixed disk sizes. Rather than let the surplus go to waste, it slices each disk into partitions that pair with equivalents on the others, builds an md array over every one of those pairings, then lets LVM present the result as the one volume you see. Getting it back means identifying each of those layers and rebuilding them in order, beginning with the partitions.
No. Volume Crashed describes what the box can no longer do, and says nothing whatever about your data. Image every drive, rebuild the pool in software away from the box, and a volume DSM has stopped mounting will usually read straight through.
You pay nothing for the look. What comes back is a list — the files that opened, the ones that did not, and one fixed figure to finish the job. Leave it switched off until you have that in writing.