Question How do I recover Seagate NAS drive data

[PhilHop]

I have a 2 bay Seagate NAS storage device on my network.
It has two 4 terabyte RAIDed drives.
This has been working for years and used for backup and common data shared across several PCs in my network.
Went away on holiday and powered shut everything down before leaving.
On return I powered up but the NAS storage does not seem to be mounting the two 4Tb drives.
No errors lights are showing.
Seagate NAS discovery asks me to clean and install each of the two drives.
I'm reluctant to do this, I think if I did it would just wipe my irreplaceable data.
Where do I go from here?

 

[fzabkar]

Install each of the drives inside your PC and retrieve a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

 

[PhilHop]

Install each of the drives inside your PC and retrieve a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

Thanks for that
I was coming to the conclusion that I could just take the drives out and mount them on my desktop PC. Hadn't heard of CrystalDiskInfo though, looks interesting.
I'll give it a try once I can work out how to get the drives out and remounted in the PC.
Thanks once again.

 

[fzabkar]

SMART is only the beginning. It tells you the physical state of your drives. If it turns out that one or both drives are affected by bad sectors, then the next step would be to clone them with a tool such as HDDSuperClone or ddrescue. Your third step would be to reassemble the RAID, either in your NAS or in Windows using a data recovery tool such as DMDE.

 

[hang-the-9]

I have a 2 bay Seagate NAS storage device on my network.
It has two 4 terabyte RAIDed drives.
This has been working for years and used for backup and common data shared across several PCs in my network.
Went away on holiday and powered shut everything down before leaving.
On return I powered up but the NAS storage does not seem to be mounting the two 4Tb drives.
No errors lights are showing.
Seagate NAS discovery asks me to clean and install each of the two drives.
I'm reluctant to do this, I think if I did it would just wipe my irreplaceable data.
Where do I go from here?

You said you used them for backup, so you should have the original files in another place to copy from if you re-do the RAID. Was the RAID setup in RAID 1? Did you contact Seagate support? "irreplaceable data" should be stored in more than one place if you really only had it on that one storage device.

If the disks were setup in RAID 1, you should still be able to get to the good disk if one failed and re-build the RAID.

 

[PhilHop]

You said you used them for backup, so you should have the original files in another place to copy from if you re-do the RAID. Was the RAID setup in RAID 1? Did you contact Seagate support? "irreplaceable data" should be stored in more than one place if you really only had it on that one storage device.

If the disks were setup in RAID 1, you should still be able to get to the good disk if one failed and re-build the RAID.

Hi, thanks for that.

I'm not too concerned about the backed up data since, as you say, I still have the originals on the other PCs on the LAN. However, I foolishly set up a "public" directory on that NAS so that things like the email inbox and filed emails could be accessed from any PC on the network running the email client but I didn't establish a backup strategy to cover that data! I guess I need a separate NAS for that sort of data and use the other NAS exclusively for backup including that data.

I have tried mounting one of the discs from the NAS into my desktop but unfortunately the desktop PC (running Win10) either doesn't recognise the format or the disc is corrupt. Oddly File Explorer sees 6 (or 7, I didn't count them) drives and none of them are readable.
I haven't run a SMART report since I didn't think the drive would be accessible.

Not sure what to do next ..... I'm thinking about it.

Thanks to all for your help though.