RAID & Server Data Recovery Auckland

Assessments are from $230, and multi-drive arrays involve more assessment work than single drives - we'll confirm the assessment price for your drive count when you ring. The recovery itself is quoted after diagnosis, because a two-drive mirror with one healthy member and a six-drive RAID 5 with two failed disks are completely different jobs. Firm, fixed quote before any recovery work, always. Details on the pricing page.

Often - with a caveat that matters. RAID 0 stripes data across every drive with no redundancy, so recovery needs every member readable. If one member has truly failed, it gets hard-drive-recovery treatment first; how completely it images decides how much of the stripe set comes back. It's the RAID level where "how soon you stopped using it" matters most.

Frequently not. Rebuilds push every surviving drive hard for hours, which is exactly when a marginal drive gives up - but "failed" during a rebuild usually means failing, not dead. We image the weak members with hardware that works around bad areas, then reconstruct the array from the images. What's genuinely at risk is anything the weak drives can no longer read - plus anything a forced resync or repair pass overwrote. The assessment establishes that honestly.

Usually just the drives, labelled with their bay order. The array's parameters can be determined from the data itself, so a dead enclosure or controller rarely blocks recovery - the main exception is hardware-encrypted sets, where the controller or NAS held the encryption keys, so mention encryption when you ring. If the unit is easy to send, include it - it occasionally speeds diagnosis - but don't hold up the job hunting for a controller card.

No. Drive order, stripe size, offsets and parity rotation are worked out analytically from the drive contents during virtual reconstruction. Labels help and save time - which is why the checklist above says label everything - but lost labels are an inconvenience, not an ending.

Often, if writes stop quickly. Deletion on a NAS mostly removes structure rather than wiping data, and snapshots (if they were enabled) can shortcut the whole exercise. Power the unit down or take it offline now - every new write onto that space is the real enemy.

Usually, yes - the array is reconstructed first, then the VM containers (VMDK, VHDX) are recovered and opened so the files inside can be extracted and verified. Tell us at assessment which VMs matter most; they're verified first.

In-house, in our Auckland lab, by the people you deal with directly - your drives aren't sent on to anyone. Files are accessed only as far as verifying the recovery requires, recovered data is held on encrypted storage until you confirm receipt, then securely erased.

Assessment timeframes depend on the array and what's in the queue, so we'll give you a realistic one when you book. Recovery time scales with drive count and drive condition - imaging a failing member can be the long pole. You'll get a realistic timeframe with your quote.

For a healthy array and routine admin - of course. But once drives are failing or a volume won't mount, every write, rebuild attempt and repair tool narrows what a lab can do afterwards. The honest division of labour: your IT provider knows your environment, we know failed arrays, and we're happy to work with them directly. The one thing nobody should do is experiment on the only copy.