Devices · NAS drives
A NAS starts life as the backup and quietly becomes the master copy for a whole household or business. When a volume degrades, the box's own helpful instincts — rebuild, scrub, repair — are exactly what finishes the data off. Power it down instead.
Talk it through with an engineer
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| The message | What it means | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Synology: Volume Crashed | The volume has failed beyond its redundancy | Power down — do not repair in DSM |
| Synology: Storage Pool Degraded | A member is failing but the pool still mounts | Every hour running raises stakes |
| QNAP: RAID unmounted / system volume not active | The array can no longer be assembled by the box | Off-box reconstruction |
| WARNING: Your files have been locked by DeadBolt | Ransomware — files renamed to .deadbolt | Photograph the screen, don't reboot |
| Buffalo E14: The RAID array cannot be mounted | Array assembly failure on a Link/TeraStation | Note the code, power off |
| Buffalo E16: Unable to find the hard drive | A member is disconnected or dead | Data usually intact on drives |
| Buffalo E30: The hard drive may be damaged | The unit has failed a member drive | Stop the rebuild instinct |
Your device is logged with its own case reference the moment it arrives. An engineer assesses the fault, confirms what's actually recoverable, and you get a fixed price in writing — no diagnosis fee, no obligation, and no paid work until you say go.
Every drive is imaged read-only, bad sectors and all — the NAS never gets the chance to resume a destructive rebuild.
Synology's SHR splits mixed-size drives into regions, builds arrays across them and glues the result with LVM; QNAP and others have their own stacks. We rebuild those layers in software, in order.
btrfs or ext4 is repaired on top of the reconstruction, shares and folder structures restored, and everything verified against a file listing you approve.
Before you pay the recovery fee you approve a full listing of what came back. Your data returns on new media with free return postage, and the case only closes once you've confirmed everything opens on your side.
The campaign that proved the point: DeadBolt began encrypting internet-exposed QNAP units on 25 January 2022 — researchers found ~3,700 devices locked in the first wave, with repeat waves through the year, after the earlier QLocker and eCh0raix campaigns. Every one exploited a NAS reachable from the internet on outdated firmware.
Two red lights on a two-bay unit, then a DIY rebuild that overwrote its own metadata. Both drives imaged past their bad sectors, the mirror reassembled from whichever image held the healthiest copy of each region, and the shared drive came back whole.
No. The array lives entirely on the drives; the box is just the interpreter. A dead unit with healthy drives is one of the more cheerful jobs on the bench.
Yes — a NAS unit can travel whole, unlike servers, where we prefer labelled drives only. Whichever is easier for you; either way the drives are imaged before anything else.
Synology Hybrid RAID carves mixed-size drives into matching regions, runs separate arrays across those regions, and joins them with LVM — so one volume may sit on stacked arrays. Recovery has to unwind that in exactly the right order.
It means the box gave up, not that the data went anywhere. Reconstruction from images routinely brings back volumes the NAS itself declared dead.
Every restart of a damaged device costs data. Open a case first — the diagnosis is free either way.