Snap Server Recovery

A NAS / SNAP server is also known as a Network Attached Storage device. Most NAS manufacturers today use patented OS systems or embedded operating systems. This creates a ‘UNIX like’ based operating system with a Linux kernel. The older NAS devices used SNAP OS, which was customized on BSD based UFS file systems. Today, NAS servers use XFS filing systems and the good news is that CSSI India handles ongoing cases for such recovery with excellent recovery should the UFS or XFS file system become corrupt for any reason, or should two or more drives in the RAID fail. NAS servers, which are manufactured by about 30 different popular vendors today, support all the major RAID configurations, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives). In some cases, we have identified unique and proprietary systems, but the most popular is the RAID-5. Most failures occur due to:

• One or more drive becoming unstable or going offline,
• Administrator tries to run “fsck” command on the system. (In ‘some’ cases this command helps the device to return online if there are some minor issues with the file system. But often this command damages the file system beyond the ability to mount the volumes back in the working stage. It is also known as the ‘Russian roulette method’. If you reading this you may be experiencing such a loss, we can help)

• Reconfiguration of RAID
• Failure of a Degraded RAID

In such cases this situation can get worse, pointer to data from inodes or superblock structure can be destroyed or lost irreversibly. In the case of logical corruption, CSSI technicians are capable to understand the internals of the file system. Without low-level knowledge of the filesystem such data cannot be recovered as manual processes need to be used in our labs. Our team knows how to find the configuration data, block size, parity information that is required to create small buy sophisticated programs to execute a recovery on the NAS device.

The common reason for NAS device RAID failure is the loss of two or more disks in the array. When one drive crashes/goes offline, the RAID becomes degraded. In this case the Server will not work optimally and the processor has to perform many more data functions to allow data access.
It is good to know that CSSI can repair or remanufacture all major vendor drives. Thereafter, recovery techniques, coding and recovery work can be performed on the NAS. It is good to know that CSSI performs many such recoveries for our competitors due to our in house expertise and skill sets and the extensive knowledge of mass storage architecture and the different file systems that exist today.

If your NAS device has failed, contact our representative at CSSI India, or ‘request a data recovery’ online. We will provide initial assessment at no cost and advise on the procedure to be followed to perform a full recovery.