Recover Data from NAS Hard Drive

Has your NAS hard drive failed? Maybe you were in the middle of an important project and nobody could access it, or maybe one of the disks failed and it had important pieces of data on it. Regardless, you’re stuck with a nonworking hard drive and you don’t have backups — or the backups you have are too old, incomplete, or failed as well. What can you do?

Understanding the NAS Hard Drive

NAS hard driveNAS, or Network Attached Storage, devices don’t just have one drive, but two or more drives within them. You connect the NAS Drive to your Local Area Network or LAN and it has its own IP address and location to store and retrieve data from it. Nothing could be simpler — or more complex.

You see, the NAS drives aren’t just hard drives. They also have operation systems, usually Linux, that acts as a translator between your computer and network and the drive, itself. The operating system runs programs that store the data in a file system that may not be compatible with your computer’s file system, and may or may not be encrypted.

What Kind of NAS RAID Hard Drive Do You Have?

Depending on whether the NAS RAID is high end, midlevel, or consumer often dictates what kind of RAID your NAS actually has. Most consumer NAS hard drives are RAID 0, which are two disks set up for fast retrieval of data. These hard drives do not have any redundancy built in, so data recovery needs to be done by professionals such as Gillware. NAS RAID 1 hard drives have a built in redundancy and the first hard disk is actually cloned by the second. Higher end NAS hard drives are RAID 5, which has some redundancy to prevent data loss, or RAID 10, which is fast access and has cloned disks.

If a disk fails with RAID 1, 5, or 10, your NAS may switch over and alert you that a disk has failed. Don’t wait for a total failure to replace the disk, or the entire unit. It’s important to keep your data backed up often to avoid such possible occurrences.

But what if your NAS hard drive fails completely?

When the NAS hard drive fails, you need professional help from NAS data recovery specialists to recover all your lost data.

It’s not unusual for a NAS hard drive to simply fail. At this point, you’ll have to rely on your backups, if you have any, or seek out a professional data recovery team to extract all your data. In some cases, the fault may not be with disks, themselves, but with the operating system or one of the components in the enclosure. It’s a bad idea to try to extract your data by pulling out the drives from the NAS and hooking your PC up to them. You’re unlikely to have your computer recognize the file system on the disk, let alone extract any useful data.

Why Recovery by Professionals is Important When it Comes to NAS Hard Drives

