Data Recovery Weekly

What we see in the support requests is that people have difficulties recovering their (or customers') NASes. For the duration of December 2014, more than half support queries associated with ReclaiMe software were in some way related to a NAS. So we decided to put off filesystems for a while and do a solid course on NAS recovery, starting with initial data collection, through partitioning schemes like FlexRAID or SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID), and to file extraction. This should be available on our training site eventually (hopefully by the end of February).

They say that when Storage Spaces is officially released and when it wins user's confidence the prices of NASes like Drobo, QNAP, or ReadyNAS will drop. We suppose that it is quite possible because a bunch of external USB 3.0 disks connected to a USB 3.0 hub and winded together using a sticky tape may become a cheap and effective alternative. Let's compare these two options based on the NewEgg prices $528 QNAP TS-419PII-US or $535 NETGEAR ReadyNas Ultra 4-bay against the set of $25 Rosewill RHB-610 (RIUH-11001) 4-Port USB 3.0 hub $164 4x SAT3510BU3 3.5" USB 3.0 SATA Enclosure w/ Fan $1 Duct Tape for a total of $190 All additional functions that are available in QNAP or other NASes for example torrent downloads or the capability to access the data via a network from multiple computers, Windows 8 can provide as well (though you may need to use free software like uTorrent)

Some new technologies have side effects which decrease data redundancy. Such technologies are: NTFS compression Windows Vista/7 vs. Windows NT/2000/XP complete format TRIM on SSDs ZFS deduplication Initially, the effect of decreasing redundancy is unnoticeable, but once the technology becomes popular, the unintended consequences appear. Volume-level NTFS compression never became widespread among home users. As Windows Vista and then Windows 7 become widespread, the number of cases when data is lost irreversibly due to reinstallation increased. You can recover some data after XP reinstallation, but not after Vista/7 reinstallation with a complete format. SSDs with TRIM are not widespread enough (yet) to notice that data recovery software does not properly work with them. As for ZFS-based NASes, then on the one hand they are not widespread among the home users, on the other hand - even the first installations did not yet reach the end of their service life.