NAS Drive Data Recovery

I posted a few days ago that what I hoped would be a simple process wasn’t. More has happened since then.

To recap, I upgraded my 2 disk DS218+ from 10TB to 16TB (nominal sizes) with the recommended Synology HDDs. As I also have (had) a 2 disk DS213Air so thought I upgrade that with the 10TB HDDs. I assume that, because the first drive I fitted had a recognizable file structure, the DS218 thought there was a problem and wouldn’t let me erase the contents and add it. I swapped the smaller drive back, and followed the instructions to join it to the drive that had remained installed. All seemed well, but then the drive that hadn’t been removed threw an error and another saying that the volume/pool had crashed. Nothing I did could either fix the errors or copy the data, so I’ve had to resort to data recovery software.

I tried software to access the Linux system, but no files were recognized, and after much Googling, I came across DMDE. The free version lets you check to see if it can do what you want it to (it did) and then buy a licence, which compared to some, was quite reasonable.

I already had a 3.5″ drive caddy, so loaded the drive that hadn’t shown an error, connected it to my laptop and set the software running. It managed to find (then recover) what I believe to be everything, although it showed errors on some, which I copied off. Note that, the software let me re-try the other files (which turned out to be with errors), though needed an OK press for each, so I created an AutoHotkey script for it. 2 days later (full scan and recover), I’ve got copies of what I hope is all of the data, ready to copy onto my newly bought DS223.

Hopefully, if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation, the above will help avoid problems, or fix them.