Data Recovery from NAS External Backup

[MindaHellfire]

Good day to everyone!

We are using a NAS at my workplace (QNAP TS470 Pro) as a CAD and document server. The NAS has four internal hard drives, each at 3TB. We have set up HDD 1 and 2 as RAID1 for the main activity and HDD 3 and 4 as RAID1 for the backup which is run each and every night.

The NAS will not copy to it's own internal HDD for the backup job, so what we have done is attached an external HDD (4TB Fantom G-Force Mega Dick Black) via eSATA. When the NAS does the nightly backup job it copies from the first RAID1 pair of internal HDDs to the external HDD, then from the external to the second RAID1 pair of internal HDDs. We have three different external HDDs that we rotate out and keep off site in case something tragic happens to the building and the entire setup gets destroyed, damaged, or stolen.

What I am wondering is for the future if something happened and our NAS box burned out or if an internal HDD failed, how can we recover the data from the external HD? When we plug it into a PC we get a formatting error since it is ex4 formatted. We have over 2.5TB of data sitting on this server, and we want to have that warm fuzzy feeling that if something happened to the box there is a reliable way to recover most, if not all, of our data from the external HDD backup.

Thanks so much for your time!!

 

[drtweak]

There are program that will allow windows to read EXT4 that or plug the hard drive into a PC, find a good simple version of a Live Linux (Many MANY different version. The most comon is Ubuntu) boot off the live disk (No need to install an OS or modify anything existing) and then it can read the disk, and then copy that to your new hard drive that you have formatted as NTFS.

 

[MindaHellfire]

Thanks so much, drtweak! Do you have a program or two that you can suggest that we can download and use to read this external HDD? I have read some things about programs corrupting the data many times, and I would like to know what is out there that has been tried and tested somewhat. This seems like the easiest and most streamlined approach, but I will do more research on this Live Linux suggestion as well. I appreciate your suggestions.

 

[drtweak]

I have used this one once in the past. Hardly come across EXT formatted stuff anymore

http://www.ext2fsd.com/

A tutorial and also other options here

http://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/