Devices · NAS boxes
It happens to almost everyone. A NAS goes in as insurance, and within two years it is the only place the photos, or the accounts, actually live. Then a volume degrades, and the controls it hands you — rebuild, scrub, repair — are what finish it off. Cutting the power is the kindest thing you can do.
Run the problem past an engineer
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| What appears | What's behind it | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Synology: Volume Crashed | More members are gone than the parity can carry | Power it off before DSM tries to repair |
| Synology: Storage Pool Degraded | A disk is on its way out; the volume still mounts | Every hour it runs costs you |
| QNAP: RAID unmounted / system volume not active | The unit can't put its own array together | Rebuild it off the box |
| WARNING: Your files have been locked by DeadBolt | Ransomware: every filename now ends .deadbolt | Photograph the screen; don't restart |
| Buffalo E14: The RAID array cannot be mounted | A LinkStation or TeraStation that can't assemble its disks | Write the E-code down, then power off |
| Buffalo E16: Unable to find the hard drive | A disk has died, or dropped out of sight | Almost always, everything is still there |
| Buffalo E30: The hard drive may be damaged | The box has thrown a disk out | Do not start the rebuild |
Every item gets its own case number on the day it lands here. An engineer traces the fault, gives you a plain assessment of what is realistically recoverable, and puts one fixed price in writing. The diagnosis is free, you are under no obligation, and chargeable work starts only when you say go.
Every member gets a read-only copy, weak sectors and all. That takes the enclosure out of play before it can try the rebuild that caused the trouble a second time.
SHR cuts drives of different sizes into matching slices, raises an array over each set of slices and binds the results with LVM; QNAP and the others each stack it their own way. Every layer gets rebuilt in software, from the bottom up.
With the stack standing again, the file system above it — btrfs or ext4 — is repaired, shares and folders return under their proper names, and you get a listing to check the whole lot against before signing it off.
You get the full list of recovered files first, and nothing is charged until you approve it. Data goes back on fresh media, return postage paid, and the job stays open on our side until you confirm every file opens at your end.
2022 settled the argument: the opening DeadBolt sweep on 25 January 2022 encrypted QNAP boxes that were reachable from the internet — around 3,600 of them in that first run, with further waves through the year, and QLocker and eCh0raix had already run the same play. What every victim had in common was an exposed unit running firmware nobody had updated.
Two red lights on a two-bay box, followed by a DIY rebuild that wiped the unit's own metadata. We imaged both disks straight past the bad sectors, then put the mirror back together block by block, keeping whichever copy read cleaner. The shared volume came back whole.
No. Everything that defines the array is written on the disks — the box only reads it. A failed enclosure with sound drives is one of the easier jobs we get.
Both are fine. Send the NAS whole if that's simpler; with servers we'd rather have the bare drives, labelled. Take the easier option — either way the first thing we do is image the disks.
Synology Hybrid RAID splits drives of different sizes into equal partitions, builds an array from each matching set, and joins them under LVM — a single volume stacked on several arrays. Recovery means peeling those layers apart in the correct order.
What's died is the enclosure, not your files. Work from images of each disk and volumes the unit had written off usually come back whole.
Switch a failing device on again and you lose a little more. Open a case before you do — the diagnosis is free, whatever it finds.