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Buffalo Technologies creates a number of quality mass storage units that are very attractive to both the consumer and corporate NAS market. They have gained in popularity both because of their ease of use and great price point.
Based on Linux technologies these systems have multiple configurations that can be done through an easy to use web interface. Like many of these smaller self contained NAS units the underlying data structure is not intuitive and requires specialized knowledge and tools to recovery efficiently and accurately.
Buffalo RAID Arrays uses a high performance file system called XFS. There are really no commercial tools that will interperate or deal with XFS. There is, however; a tool called xfsrepair that is often used against these disks.
We do not recommend the use of this tool on these devices. Because this is a repair tool and not a recovery tool, you can think of it as being like chkdisk, scandisk, fsck, and utilities of this nature. These tools can sometimes help but more often when these tools are ran they can fragment the data and overwrite data or simply destroy the file system structure, damaging or completely destroying your data. This is particularly true when dealing with RAID arrays, if the array stripe is damaged or simply out of alignment, this will cause severe damage. This means that even if alignment is only off by one sector out of every million, any repair tool will create more damage and make the recovery much more complicated. There are procedural steps and checks that must be taken before anything like this should ever be attempted and should only be attempted by a highly knowledgeable UNIX person.
Another issue that other recovery labs have with Buffalo NAS units is when files are deleted. Because XFS is a high performance file system it does not delete files in a way that leaves vestiges of the file in the same way that other file systems do. Because of this many data recovery companies believe that deleted data is impossible to be recovered from these systems. Most will still ask for the job. This is because either they do not understand the issues involved in a recovery of this complexity, because they know that Buffalo has stages of deletion and they are hoping that it is just sitting in a deleted folder that you do not know about, or because they are hoping to get raw files and lead you to believe that this is the only recovery possible. RAID Recovery Labs has developed proprietary software and techniques that allows us to repeatedly and confidently recover these devices 100%. We are unaware of any other recovery company with the knowledge, tools and techniques to recovery these devices intact. Our engineers repeatedly recover where other data recovery companies have failed.
If you have been to another recovery company and they have failed your job or only recovered raw data, give us a call. We will get your data back.
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