A disk failure and a power cut together dropped an SHR volume offline — rebuilt from images of the member disks.
An architecture firm's Synology NAS lost a disk, then took a power cut mid-rebuild, after which the volume crashed and would no longer mount. On it sat the firm's whole project store — live drawings, models and archives. Synology's SHR layout rides on Linux RAID with a btrfs file system above it, and a half-finished rebuild cut short by a power loss is one of the classic ways to bring the entire structure down: the rebuild leaves the array inconsistent and the power cut piles on.
The first principle with any NAS or RAID failure is that you never touch the original disks — an in-place repair on a degraded array is the fastest way to lose the lot. We pulled each disk and assessed it on its own. One had genuinely failed and was struggling; the rest were healthy but carried an array left inconsistent by the interrupted rebuild.
Each disk was imaged separately — the failed one on a DeepSpar Disk Imager to recover as much as possible from a struggling drive, 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 right order, then mounting the btrfs file system on top to extract the data. The originals were never touched at any stage.
From the rebuilt volume we checked the firm's drawings, models and archives opened correctly, then returned it all 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 itself a backup — a RAID guards against one 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.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
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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.