A disk failure and a power cut together took an SHR volume offline - rebuilt from images of the member disks.
An architecture firm's Synology NAS lost a disk and then suffered a power cut during the resulting rebuild, after which the volume crashed and would no longer mount. On it sat the firm's entire project store — live drawings, models and archives. Synology's SHR layout sits on top of Linux RAID with a btrfs file system above that, and a half-finished rebuild interrupted by a power loss is one of the classic ways to bring the whole structure down: the rebuild leaves the array in an inconsistent state and the power cut compounds it.
The first principle with any NAS or RAID failure is that you never work on the original disks — attempting an in-place repair on a degraded array is the quickest way to lose everything. We took each disk out and assessed it individually. One had genuinely failed and was struggling; the others were healthy but carried an array left inconsistent by the interrupted rebuild.
Each disk was imaged individually — the failed one on a DeepSpar Disk Imager to recover as much as possible from a drive that was struggling, with the PC3000 covering any firmware-level faults. With full images of every member safely taken, we rebuilt the array in software rather than on the hardware: recovering the SHR configuration, reassembling the underlying Linux RAID and LVM layers in the correct order, and then mounting the btrfs file system on top to extract the data. The originals were never touched throughout.
From the reconstructed volume we confirmed the firm's drawings, models and archives opened correctly, then returned everything on fresh media.
The firm's entire project store came back, returned on fresh media after seven working days. The lesson many businesses learn the hard way is that a NAS is not in itself a backup — a RAID protects against a single disk failing, but a failed rebuild, a power event or a controller fault can take the whole array, so an independent backup of anything critical is essential.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Recovering your data starts with getting the device to us. Pack it safely, add your contact details, and send it over — after we run a free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work begins.
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Yes — Synology, QNAP, Netgear and others. We image every disk read-only and rebuild the SHR, X-RAID or Btrfs volume away from the box, never on the original disks.
From £500 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed written quote first.
No — a rebuild is when most data is lost. Power it down, remove the disks labelled in order, and send them to us.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.