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How to Recover Data from RAID 5 Based on NAS QNAP TS-412
Have you accidentally deleted some information, formatted the hard disk or realized your NAS device is out of order? Read this article to find out how to recover data from a RAID system based on NAS QNAP TS-412.
A QNAP NAS storage system consists of several hard disks. To improve resilience and data safety, such devices enable you to create RAID systems of various types. However, even the most reliable storage systems may encounter emergencies like accidental deletion of files, formatting or damaging the hard disk, system errors, controller failures and other hardware issues, which may result in loss of important data.
If NAS works properly and you just removed some important files by accident, you can try restoring them from the Network Recycle Bin.
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You can configure the Network Recycle Bin or check its settings by accessing Control Panel – Network & File Services – Network Recycle Bin.
Check if this option is enabled.
Then make sure it is enabled for the specific folder from where the data was deleted. Click on this Shared folder link, find the required directory in the list and click on the Folder Property button to modify its settings. The option to Enable Network Recycle Bin must be checked.
Now that the shared folder option is enabled, the deleted files must be in that folder, and they can be recovered.
Open File Station and go to the directory where the removed files used to be stored; you will see a folder with the name @Recycle which contains all files deleted from this directory.
Select them and click Recover to have them reappear in their original location.
If your QNAP system won’t turn on, it may be out of order. But what can you do with all the data that’s still on the disks? There is no way to access the files by just connecting the disks to the computer. You can try replacing the device itself, but there’s no guarantee that the information will still be intact after you configure the new server.
Take the disks out of the QNAP device, and remember the order in which they were arranged: this is something you’ll need for the recovery process.
Usually disk bays have corresponding factory markings.
After that, put the drives into the new QNAP, observing the correct order. If the damage has not affected the storage devices and their contents, your new system is likely to work as if nothing happened.
However, you should take into account the chances of the new device overwriting the data still remaining on the disks.
That is why it is better to use specialized data recovery tools and avoid taking unnecessary risks. There’s Hetman RAID Recovery to give you a helping hand, so you can restore files both from healthy RAID systems, and from separate disks within such arrays. Even if several disks are damaged and the remaining data cannot be identified, the utility will read the data from other disks which are still healthy.
For illustration purposes, we’ve got a NAS device with four disks, three of them combined into a RAID 5 system.
As to the file system, for many years all disks in QNAP devices tend to be formatted into EXT FS. Let’s simulate a scenario when the controller or another hardware element breaks down suddenly.
Before you start the recovery process, make sure you have a storage device with the capacity equal to or larger than the amount of data stored on your RAID system.
The next step is to connect the hard disk to a Windows computer.
The usual problem with connecting multiple disks is that your computer may not have enough SATA ports or power connectors. However, this can be fixed with various power splitter adapters and expansion cards.
Make sure that everything is connected properly, power on the computer, download Hetman RAID Recovery from the official website, install and run it.
When started, the utility will scan the disks automatically and will also try to build the RAID system and then display all available information. Right-click on the array icon, and select Open from the list.
One by one, select the files to be recovered, and then click Recovery. Specify the directory to save the files to, and click Recovery again. All the recovered data will be saved to the directory you have chosen.
Many users are wondering how to recover an array when only one disk is down. In theory, the broken disk in your RAID 5 needs to be replaced, and everything should be fine again.
However, things may go wrong from time to time, and during the recovery process you may encounter an error or some other nasty thing that will inevitably result in loss of data. QNAP uses a Linux md-raid driver to manage the disk array. If these records are damaged, the operating system cannot access a RAID volume any longer, and to the user, this situation looks like a typical scenario of losing all of their data.
It should be remembered that the best way to avoid data loss is to back up your information regularly. QNAP supports a lot of third-party tools to back up your files and even entire disks to external storage devices, remote servers or cloud services.
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