Recovering data from a dismantled raid 0

I have a QNAP ts-212 2 bay enclosure, until recently it housed two 3TB drives in a RAID 0.

I have just swapped the drives to two 5TB drives in RAID 0, my backups appear to be missing a couple of files and I would like to recover them, however I'm concerned that each time I've installed a drive in this enclosure it begins by formatting it.

The original drives are untouched.

I do have single drive USB enclosures if they will in any way help.

Is there any way to recover these files without wiping out the data by reinstalling them in the QNAP?

BlueRad

Posted 2017-07-10T00:27:34.733

Reputation: 11

3Your best bet is to take a full disk image of both disks first. Then you can try inserting them and see if that works (with your full image available in case it wipes them). Perhaps someone else will know a more direct method... – Bob – 2017-07-10T00:33:23.580

2The only way would be to put both drives in. The reason a single drive is being formatted is because the raid is being rebuilt. Do not put the original drives in, duplicate them, then use the duplicates – Ramhound – 2017-07-10T00:55:09.797

1Worth pointing out that RAID 0 has zero fault tolerance. So hopefully it's not actually RAID 0 your using – Ramhound – 2017-07-10T02:13:15.443

Answers

(I don't have one but) QNAP apparently uses Linux, and presents as "Software RAID" using standard "mdadm".

DO A BITCOPY BACKUP OF YOUR DISKS BEFORE TRYING THE BELOW - THERE IS ALWAYS RISK WHEN PLAYING WITH BLOCK DEVICES.

This means you should be able to boot a Pendrive Linux distro (Ubuntu Desktop can do this ), and then recreate the RAID array using MDADM with minimal risk of reinitialising the drives. You can Google authorative information on how to do this, but maybe try something like :

   mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sdxX /dev/sdyX 
   mkdir /tmpmountpoint 
   mount /dev/md0 /tmpmountpoint

Then copy the desired data from /tmpmountpoint.

davidgo

Posted 2017-07-10T00:27:34.733

Reputation: 49 152

And if this doesn't work, the 0 in RAID-0 indicates how much data redundancy you have... – ivanivan – 2017-07-10T05:03:58.670

While I have not attempted to recover from a broken Raid-0 I have used this to recover a raid-5. Beware of similarly-named software! One thing nice about it is that it has a demo mode that does everything but actually recover files over 64k--this lets you find out if it's going to do the job before you buy it.

Loren Pechtel

Posted 2017-07-10T00:27:34.733

Reputation: 2 234