Anatomy of a QNAP Raid Recovery 

The evolution of raid technology over the past few years has brought a preponderance of devices that lie as isolated storage devices in a network topology. It is essential to understand that Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are in and of themselves a simple personal computer with a defined purpose. That purpose is to store and present data in a timely fashion through a network. The configuration and maintenance of the NAS in order to be useful and functional must be simple, concise, and bordered to the point that the integrity of the technology as well as the data cannot be compromised.

With the above being said, there are times that even with prudent safeguards in place there will be failures in either hardware, software, or both that will present a malfunction that must be handled outside of the device itself. In other words, the device and or data becomes sick and the doctor must operate in order to save the patient.

QNAP devices are based upon a standard Linux operating system kernel in conjunction with two file system types. This fact alone offers a myriad of opportunities for recovery of a client’s data.  The following is a simple yet effective solution top recovering a QNAP NAS device of almost any configuration.

Remove disks from device

It is reasonable to assume that there most likely exists an anomaly in the device that has caused either the configuration and or data to be inaccessible and thus should be eliminated from the recovery solution. Removing the disks from the device allows a clearer path for not only data extraction but for hard drive diagnostic testing.

Evaluate current storage media

Once we have eliminated the possibility of a device malfunction by removing the disks the next logical step is to evaluate the disks for viability. This can be easily done by any surface scanning software that allows for tracking bad reads and writes and presents the data in a clear and readable format.

Mounting storage media

The method used here is entirely up to the technician as both are equally effective. First, build a Linux distribution that supports ‘mdadm’ and allow it to do its work and mount the raid. There are numerous functions for using ‘mdadm’ and many of them allow for the successful recovery of the array.

Second, would be to use any commercial piece of software that supports not only mounting Linux file systems but can read and use embedded mdraid configuration files. These commercial tools offer a solid solution to data recovery without putting the data in jeopardy. There are several tools in the marketplace that offer a clean documentation path as well as technical support for your recovery.

It can easily be said that short of a drive being damaged to the point of not mounting there are several methods that will bring your data back online. If, however, your QNAP NAS device has hard drives that did not pass the evaluation process, DTI Data offers numerous QNAP RAID Recovery solutions to effectively recover data from those damaged drives so that ‘Mounting Storage Media’ can be accomplished.