QNAP NAS Recovery
Your QNAP is down. Your footage is not gone.
QNAP NAS recovery for film, photography and music professionals — failed arrays, corrupted volumes, dead controllers, deleted projects. Power it down, leave the drives in order, and talk to an engineer before running any repair tool.
The problem
Large media libraries fail differently.
A QNAP NAS holding years of raw footage, masters and session files is not a typical office file server — and it does not fail like one.
QNAP units are popular with production houses, photography studios and audio professionals precisely because they hold huge volumes of media on flexible RAID arrays. That flexibility is also what makes a failure so disruptive: a single degraded array can lock away terabytes of footage, finished masters and years of unreplaceable session work in one event.
We see the same failure modes again and again:
- Multi-drive failure in RAID 5/6 arrays under heavy read/write load from video editing.
- Corrupted volumes after firmware updates, power loss, or a failed QTS/QuTS hero upgrade.
- Deleted or overwritten projects — accidental deletion, snapshot rollback gone wrong, or a re-formatted volume.
- Encrypted volumes that will not mount after a controller or motherboard failure.
- Failed rebuilds after a drive was swapped and the array put itself further out of reach.
This page is part of our wider NAS data recovery service — everything below applies specifically to QNAP hardware and to the large-media workflows common in film, photography and music.
Before anything else
Stop before you make it worse.
Most unrecoverable QNAP arrays are made unrecoverable by well-meant attempts to fix them.
- Do not force a rebuild. Rebuilding onto a degraded array is the single most common cause of total loss on multi-drive QNAP failures.
- Do not run QTS repair tools or reformat the volume. Volume repair utilities "fix" a file system by discarding what they cannot parse — including your media.
- Do not swap drives and reinitialise before speaking to us. Initialisation overwrites the array configuration a recovery depends on.
- Do power the unit down cleanly, label the drive bays and order, and note exactly what happened and what has already been tried.
Call us before trying anything further. A short conversation with an engineer is often the difference between a full recovery and a permanent loss.
Capability
Every QNAP failure mode, in-house.
RAID Arrays
RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and QNAP hybrid RAID — multiple failed members, failed rebuilds, degraded arrays.
Learn more →QTS & QuTS hero
Ext4 and ZFS-based volumes recovered natively, including snapshot and thin-provisioning structures.
Encrypted Volumes
Volume- and folder-level encryption handled in the lab, provided valid credentials are available.
Large Media Files
Multi-gigabyte video masters, RAW image sets and high-resolution audio sessions reconstructed intact, not just file-carved.
Deleted & Overwritten Projects
Accidental deletion, failed rollback, and reformatted volumes — recovered from the underlying array structure where possible.
Physical Drive Failures
Failed drives from within the array rebuilt in our lab — head swaps, firmware repair, media damage — under one roof.
Learn more →Process
From failed NAS to restored library.
- 01
Triage call
An engineer talks through what happened, the drive order, and the number of drives affected — and tells you what to do, and what not to do, next.
- 02
Evaluation & fixed quote
Drives are imaged individually and the array structure analysed. You receive an honest recoverability assessment and a fixed quote before any recovery work begins.
- 03
Recovery on clones
The array is reconstructed from verified images of every drive — your originals are never put at further risk.
- 04
Verification & return
Recovered footage, images and audio are spot-checked for integrity — files open, projects relink — then returned on encrypted media.
Transparent pricing
QNAP array recovery pricing.
Priced by array size and drive count. Fixed quote confirmed after diagnosis; prices exclude VAT.
All prices below are net (before VAT). We add VAT at 20% on top — shown beneath each price as “inc VAT”, which is the total you actually pay. For example, a £425 net recovery is £510 including VAT. VAT-registered businesses can usually reclaim it.
RAID, Server, NAS & DAS
| Array size | 2 drives | 3 drives | 4 drives | 5 drives |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 TB – 4 TB | £1,000£1,200 inc VAT | £1,500£1,800 inc VAT | £2,500£3,000 inc VAT | £2,900£3,480 inc VAT |
| 4 TB – 8 TB | £1,200£1,440 inc VAT | £1,800£2,160 inc VAT | £2,800£3,360 inc VAT | £3,200£3,840 inc VAT |
| 8 TB – 12 TB | £1,500£1,800 inc VAT | £2,750£3,300 inc VAT | £3,100£3,720 inc VAT | £3,800£4,560 inc VAT |
Covers RAID arrays, servers, NAS and DAS enclosures. Larger arrays and 6+ drives quoted individually.
See the full price list for turnaround options and single-drive pricing.
Questions
Asked by studios and production teams.
Two drives in our QNAP RAID 5 have failed. Is it gone?
Usually not. Multi-drive failure is our standard workload for QNAP arrays: each failed member is imaged and recovered individually, then the array is reconstructed from those images. What causes permanent loss is a forced rebuild attempt, not the second drive failure itself.
The QNAP already tried to rebuild the array automatically. Can it still be recovered?
Often, yes — but power it down now and stop any further rebuild attempts. Each rebuild progressively overwrites data, so the amount that remains recoverable shrinks the longer it continues. Send it to us as-is and we will assess honestly what is left.
Can you recover an encrypted QNAP volume?
Yes, provided you can supply the valid encryption credentials. Without them the data cannot be decrypted by us or anyone else — this is by design.
Will our footage and project files still be usable, not just recovered as raw data?
That is the goal, not just a file count. We verify that video masters play, RAW sets are intact, and audio sessions relink correctly wherever the underlying data allows it — not simply that a file of the right size exists.
What will it cost?
Diagnosis first, then a fixed quote based on array size, drive count and what the recovery actually requires — agreed with you before any work begins.
Speak directly to an engineer. We will tell you what to do — and what not to do — before you touch it again.