NAS Recovery Solutions

NAS vendors and data recovery specifics

On this page, you find the most popular NAS vendors and for some of them we give specifics which should be taken into account when recovering data from a NAS device.

NETGEAR – until 2013, the vendor used EXT filesystem, but since then has implemented Btrfs filesystem in all their devices. Since Btrfs has not been widely used up to that point there were no software capable to recover data from. Nowadays, some data recovery software vendors have already implemented algorithms for Btrfs recovery, but there is really a small number of such data recovery tools and the price is about $200.

Drobo – NASes from this vendor are difficult if not impossible to recover, since Drobo does not use typical RAID layouts like RAID0, RAID5 or RAID6, but instead utilizes its own one. At the moment, there is no commercially available software to recover data from Drobo devices. Moreover, even if you decide to send your Drobo NAS to a data recovery service, not every service will undertake a case. And even those who dare to try to recover data will not give you any predictions and guarantees as to recovery outcome.

Synology – in NASes from this vendor, it is possible to use disks of different sizes. Such NASes are called Synology Hybrid RAID. This specific complicates data recovery to some extent.

In addition to the above NAS vendors, the following ones are also popular among users:

  • QNAP
  • Buffalo
  • Thecus
  • Iomega
  • Western Digital