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A SNAP server Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. It is currently owned and supported by Adaptec. There is ever increasing pressure for network attached storage developer’s to produce quality devices that mount simply, easy, and every time. Many companies have worked to accomplish this through the use of embedded Linux software and drivers that are common to the Linux system. This allows them a certain amount of performance tuning and a lot more flexibility as far as development platforms.
SNAP took a little different stance on the SNAP server systems. Instead of using Linux and Reiser/EXT3/XFS file systems the SNAP system was based off of the Berkley Software Distribution of UFS. They moved a lot of the boot parameters, web services, and key elements of the system into ROM chips. They also changed the UNIX File System (UFS) in proprietary ways that splits the core operating system in two significant ways. The first was SNAP OS and then currently Guardian OS which each have subtle differences to one another and more significantly to UFS. These changes not only make typical UFS Data recovery software impossible to use but also because of the streamlining of the SNAP Servers OS at every level they are often very robust and reliable but when errors do occur they can be catastrophic. Recently SNAP Servers are utilizing the XFS filesystem, at RAID Recovery Labs we are experts on XFS.
The SNAP Servers will support JBOD (Just a bunch of Disks) and RAID Levels 0, 1, and 5. We have found that at all RAID levels including RAID 5 the systems will go off line and force a fsck (unix chkdisk) if the either the first disk or any two disks fail. Fsck can sometimes help the disks to force back online if there are particular types of damage to the proprietary file systems, but often it will damage the file system beyond the ability for the system to mount the drives.
When this happens you need a mass storage data recovery company who cannot only repair the damaged drives, and interpret the file system, but also be able to extract lost files that exist on the disks but are no longer linked in the filesystem. This requires an understanding of the unique File Pointers, Super blocks, and more. It is not a trivial task and many times requires on the fly programming to get everything that can be recovered. Some data recovery companies will cheat this and return what is called “raw” data. That is data that has lost the original names, dates, and folder structures. Return of data of this type is generally due to the fact that they either did not assemble the array correctly or because they lack understanding of the file system and how to recreate the damaged structures.
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