NAS RECOVERY FAQ

A: Home NAS Recovery software is designed to recover files and documents from various NAS devices. The compatibility list includes: QNAP, NETGEAR, Buffalo, Western Digital, Synology, Lenovo, iomega, Seagate, Thecus, and D-Link.

A: In short, Home NAS Recovery works.

Theoretically, if you cannot get access to the NAS disks, you can connect them to Linux and try to restart the array. However, this approach works only in simplest cases, for example when a NAS box failed while disks are absolutely intact. With intact disks, it is possible to use the set of Linux commands to copy the data. However, with some NAS models it does not work in any case, for example because filesystem block sizes are different.

In the majority of cases metadata on NAS disks is damaged (if ever so slightly), and you cannot copy data using Linux commands. The NAS itself uses Linux and if it cannot access the array in the given situation, Linux also will not be able to revive the array. For such kind of failures, NAS recovery software is the only option to get access to the data stored on the NAS.

A: Generally, NAS vendors use similar schemes to store data in their NASes. There is a good chance Home NAS Recovery will work with your NAS as well. In any case, Home NAS Recovery is a read-only software so it makes sense to try it and see what it brings.

A: For Home NAS Recovery to see the disks, you should connect them to a PC separately: via SATA ports on the motherboard or via USB-to-SATA adapters. If you do connect the disks properly but still they are not shown, something is wrong with the connections – check them and try once again. Also, consider contacting our technical support.

A: Yes, it is. Anyway, you should get the disks out of the NAS, connect them to a PC separately, and run Home NAS Recovery to see what can be recovered.

A: Based on our experience, the odds to recover data in such case are slightly better than 1:1, that is, slightly better than 50%. So, it is worth trying. Get the disks out of the NAS, connect them to a PC separately, and run Home NAS Recovery software.

A: Yes, Home NAS Recovery is designed for these cases as well.

A: All depends on the RAID layout used in your particular NAS. With redundant arrays like RAID1, RAID10, or RAID5, Home NAS Recovery allows recovery when no more than one disk is missing. In all other cases, you need to repair the missing disk(s) first.

A: Unfortunately, a NAS is designed in such a way that it doesn't provide a low-level access to a filesystem. However, data recovery tools work with filesystem metadata; that's why even if you need just to undelete a file from a NAS, you still need to get the disks out of the NAS and connect them to a PC separately.

A: No, Home NAS Recovery is one of the few NAS recovery software, which can automatically detect a configuration used in your NAS.

A: Yes, no matter what operating system was used on your host PC, Home NAS Recovery can recover your NAS data given that you run it on a Windows PC.

A: Preferably, use SATA ports on your motherboard to connect the NAS disks. Once all the SATA ports are in use, you can connect the remaining disks via USB.

A: Connect part of the NAS disks via SATA ports and then connect the remaining disks using USB-to-SATA adapters.

A: Home NAS Recovery is the only software, which is not being a freeware, nevertheless allows to recover data from NASes for free. This limited-time offer (ends July 1^st 2016) applies to the single-disk and two-disk NASes. If you have one of those, you do not need to purchase a license key – just launch the software and get your NAS data recovered. You can have a look at this 3-minute YouTube video on how to recover NAS for free.

A: Home NAS Recovery is designed in such a way that from a user side the recovery process looks the same on various NAS devices. Obviously, from the software side, different recovery algorithms are used for different NAS devices. For example, QNAP uses ext filesystem while Buffalo uses XFS, therefore absolutely different approaches should be applied.

To get more information on NAS data recovery from different vendors and to know with what NAS models Home NAS Recovery is compatible for, please refer to:

• D-Link NAS recovery
• Synology NAS recovery
• Seagate NAS Recovery

A: Modern QNAP NASes have very complex design where there are several levels of data organization:

• RAID level at which different disks are combined into a single large storage with a certain level of redundancy.
• Partition level at which the RAID is sliced into partitions. Typically, there are several meta partitions (small) and one data partition (large) with user data.
• Cluster map for data partition. Unlike other NASes (D-Link, Synology, Buffalo), QNAP data partition is not linear where disk space is allocated from the beginning to the end; instead, it uses a cluster map resulting in non-linear data allocation. The cluster map is a bottleneck of the QNAP data storing technique.
• Filesystem level at which files and folders are stored.

QNAP failure may include failure of any or all of the levels above making QNAP NAS recovery a complex and non-trivial task. QNAP NAS Recovery software is designed for thorough recovery of all the QNAP data organization levels – from RAID, to partitions, to cluster map, and to filesystem. Refer here for more information about QNAP Recovery.