QNAP NAS Repair and Recovery

QNAP NAS and RAID set-ups are software and hardware systems that are capable of reading or writing data to and from numerous hard drives, in a modern system various levels of RAID systems may be nested or joined to provide more data redundancy & integrity or for more read/write speed, The level of a QNAP NAS RAID is always indicated using a number from 0-6 for instance RAID 0 or RAID 1 an instance of a nested RAID would be RAID 1+0 the 1 means a RAID 1 and the 0 means a RAID 0. QNAP NAS repair and file / folder recovery is central to UK services.

QNAP Hard Drive Recovery

A QNAP NAS RAID uses striping to offer fault tolerance in the event of disk failure also it supplies a better read speed, fault-tolerance is achieved through having data stored across the hard drives but with parity data stored as well, if a drive breaks the lost data may be rebuilt using the parity data stored on the other drives. QNAP NAS set-ups optimise storage space provided by RAID’s as there are no big quantities of data on a single drive, a RAID 5 has certain benefits.
QNAP NAS Benefits :
1. Optimise Storage use
2. Protection against disk drive failure
3. Quick read speed

If the data that is used by your company isn’t altered on a regular basis but is obtained and read by numerous systems, a RAID 5 is the perfect option. Yet the write speed is decreased in comparing with other NAS’s due to the fact that it must write the parity at the same time as the authentic files, although it has a fast read speed making it ideal for large quantities of users needing to get the data all at one time, additionally you will need to be aware of some possible failures that can occur.

QNAP NAS Data Recovery

QNAP NAS repair and recovery specialists RAID and Server Data Recovery (http://raid-and-server-data-recovery.com/nas-data-recovery/qnap-nas-data-recovery/ provide QNAP repair and recovery services in the UK. Additionally as a repair of QNAP NAS, isn’t a back-up solution it offers a definite level of protection against one drive breaking, if one drive does fail the system enters critical mode where the read and write speed is significantly slowed down, the failed drive must be replaced as quickly as possible because when the drive isn’t changed and another breaks the system will be unable to reconstruct itself and you’d be looking at a significant price to regain some of the data.

A QNAP repair has some integrated data recovery redundancy defence and is capable of fast read speeds if configured by Raid and server data recovery, it is best suited for a business which depends on quick access to data to be successful. Once a NAS has been set up you will notice a significant difference in the read speed of your system.

I’ve been supporting RAID and servers for longer than I care to remember… I think the earliest server (excluding ICL mainframes) that I worked on was an ICL Intel 486 system, back in something like 1992.

This was before Windows and as we know, things have moved on significantly since then. Servers were complicated beasts back then, now they’re even more complex. One thing that really annoys me is 1st/2nd line technical support staff who rather than admit they don’t know what they’re talking about will recommend the wrong course of action because they don’t know any different.

Here’s my response to an email from a customer of ours with a 7 disk RAID 5 server that has significant bad sector problems across several of the disk in the volume. The customer has been told by his tech support to rebuild the array and everything will work fine… WRONG, the rebuild will fail because of the bad sectors across multiple drives. This will cause a huge amount of irreversible data loss for the customer who is a professional video editor.

Hi <X>,

My colleague <Y> has just informed me you’ve been in touch after speaking to tech support regarding your RAID.

The rebuild procedure they suggest will unfortunately not complete successfully due to several of your hard drives having bad sectors issues. Rebuilding is an automated software task that relies on all the drives involved being free from bad sectors. Rebuilding is unable to cope with bad sectors – which are a physical problem. This is why drives with bad sectors have to be recovered using hardware rather than software. I wrote a blog post about this sometime ago, titled something like ‘5 things you mustn’t do if your RAID fails’. – take a look at all of it – especially the last point: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/raid-or-server-failure-the-top-5-things-to-avoid/

As you know, we’ve been doing this long enough to know what we’re talking about, so may I suggest two possible courses of action –

1. We complete the recovery as planned.

Or

2. We first clone all your hard drives (effectively copying them) before returning them to you so you can then try the rebuild. Us having cloned your hard drives means we can go back to the data and perform the recovery when the rebuild doesn’t work.

Rebuilds that are unsuccessful result in massive data loss across the entire RAID and are irreversible due to the old (good) data being overwritten by the new (corrupt) data. It’s one of the largest causes of data loss on any type of RAID 5 system, and we wish tech support companies would stop recommending it as they are assuming all the hard drives in the array are free from bad sectors (which is the reason your RAID fell over in the first place).

Please let us know how you’d like to proceed.

I’ve just emailed this to the customer and await their response.

I don’t know about you, but these days the family environment is a busy one when it comes to IT and computers. My eldest daughter has her own laptop and my youngest daughter has an IPad. They both have smartphones too. As well and texting and all the other things teenagers use their mobile phones for, they also take a lot of photographs that want to save.

Saving this data on the family iMac was fine – there was plenty os space and it was an easy thing to achieve but as time went by there was more and more data to store – more photos, more videos and now music too. Using the internet to search for an answer to my problem, my attention was drawn to Network Attached Storage, otherwise known as NAS. Basically these are devices that connect to the router in your house an allow anyone connected to that router to use them. Great I thought – I’ll get one of those !

So I did, everyone was happy. It came in a nice box with a link to Datlabs NAS Data Recovery Services, who I could call if I needed any technical assistance setting the NAS up and getting it working correctly. I just plugged it in, typed our password and it installed itself on our network. The first thing to do was to transfer all our photos, videos and music data from our family Mac onto the NAS. That was easy – a simple drag and drop operation saw that completed without any problems. There was a lot of data – some 50GB or so… How do teenagers make so much data?? All of which was of course, essential to them.

Anyway with that done I set about cleaning the Mac up and deleting files and folders. Another 30 minutes or so and this was completed. The first thug I noticed was the the machine began to run a lot quicker – which was a result I was very pleased with.

Next I took a look at the configuration of our new NAS device. It’s a 4 disk Linux based storage device that runs RAID 5. This means that the data it holds is spread across the whole 4 disks instead of one. That’s a bit odd I thought but after closer investigation I learned that this was infact a good thing. It allows one drive to fail and my data to still survive without being lost. RAID 5 also provide enhanced data read speeds too – something that was evident from the moment we began using our NAS file server concurrently. My daughters could watch their movies while I was able to stream music from it. This all worked fine – something that we could never do before on the Mac as it was just not quick enough.

So introducing a NAS RAID file server into our home environment has been a great success. Installing it was easy and I didn’t need to contact Datlabs for help in setting it up, I do think I’ll keep their link though just incase anything happens to the NAS that I can’t sort out myself.