Specialist · RAID 1 mirror recovery
RAID 1 writes the same data to two drives at once, so one can die without taking your files with it. That is the whole trick, and it is worth having. What it never was is a backup. Delete a folder and both copies go. Ransomware encrypts the pair together. A controller can drop one member quietly, months before anybody spots the light. So we image both drives, work out which one holds the newer truth, and rebuild from that — never over the top of the good member.
Run the problem past an engineer
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| The problem | What's behind it | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Both drives are healthy, the files aren't | A deletion or ransomware reaches the second drive in the same instant | Stop writing to it; power down |
| The NAS has been showing degraded — since who knows when | One member was dropped long ago; its copy stopped that day | Change nothing until it's imaged |
| The second drive failed a few weeks after the first | Same model, same batch, same warm box — pairs wear out together | Send both, the dead one included |
| A rebuild was started and made things worse | The sync ran the wrong way and wrote over the good copy | Pull the plug straight away |
| A My Cloud Mirror that won't come up | Often the box or its firmware rather than the disks sitting in it | Send the unit whole, or both disks |
| A single member won't mount in a Windows PC | Two-bay NAS mirrors run Linux formats a PC has never been taught | Nothing is broken; it needs a lab |
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.
Both members are imaged read-only, the weaker one on a hardware imager that can be told to back off. Your own disks are never written to, so nothing done here can make matters worse.
The two images are compared: file-system timestamps, journal state, the array's own event counts and update times. That is how a member dropped back in March shows itself, and how we settle which side of the mirror holds your current work.
The chosen image is mounted, repaired where the file system is torn, and searched for anything the mirror faithfully deleted. Then files get opened — a spreadsheet, a photo, a database — because a folder tree on its own proves nothing.
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.
What we can and cannot promise: where both members still read, a mirror job is usually straightforward — image the pair, pick the newer copy, hand it back. It gets harder when the mirror has dutifully copied a deletion or an encryption, because then we are carving files out of free space, and harder again when a rebuild has already written over the good member. Even then there is often something left. Which of those you are in is exactly what the free diagnosis settles.
A small studio's Synology mirror dropped a member in March; the amber light lived in a cupboard, so nobody saw it. By October the other drive was failing too. Both were imaged, the dying one slowly, and the copies compared. Current work came off the failing disk, the gaps were filled from the March copy, and every file taken from the older side was listed as such.
We'll be straight: RAID 1 is usually the kinder case. Each member holds a full copy, so one healthy disk often carries the whole job. The trouble sits elsewhere. Run degraded for weeks and the surviving disk can hold a stale version of your files. Start a rebuild in the wrong direction and an older or blank member gets written over the good one. And whatever is deleted or encrypted copies itself to both disks at once — a mirror is not a backup. Which of those you have comes out of the free diagnosis, before you owe anything.
Send the pair. A mirror should hold two matching copies, but they drift — one member drops out while the other keeps writing, and each collects bad sectors the other hasn't. Two disks let us fill one's unreadable patches from the other. Ship them untouched: no formatting, no test scans, nothing retried in the enclosure, and mark which bay each came from. A disk a PC calls dead will often still image on bench hardware, and what it yields decides how clean the rebuild is.
Never by guessing, and never on the original disks. Both members are imaged first, then the two copies are compared: file-system timestamps, journal state, and the array's own metadata — the mdadm event counts and update times each disk carries. A member that was dropped quietly back in March gives itself away there, because its event count stopped on the day it left. That is what settles the rebuild direction before anything is written, and it matters: sync the stale member over the live one and the good copy is gone in minutes.
The mirroring works the same way; the members do not. A dead SSD gives you a locked controller instead of weak sectors, so chip-level work comes before any rebuild. TRIM is the second catch: a running pair quietly clears space you have deleted, so an accidental deletion on mirrored SSDs is seldom worth chasing. The moment the set misbehaves, stop using it and send both drives in together.
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.