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πŸ”§ Case Study

How We Recovered a Decade of Family Photos From a Dead NAS

🏒 Tech Hero Computer Repair (Phoenix, AZ) · September 13, 2026

πŸ˜– The problem

A customer's home NAS (network drive) with 10 years of family photos died after a power surge. Two IT shops told them the data was gone. The drives spun but the RAID array wouldn't mount.

πŸ› οΈ What we did

We imaged all four drives before touching anything (rule #1 of data recovery: never work on the original). Two drives had stale RAID metadata from a past rebuild β€” the classic 'RAID confused about its own layout' problem. We rebuilt the array virtually in read-only mode, reconstructed the filesystem, and pulled the data to a new drive.

βœ… The outcome

100% of the photos recovered β€” about 400 GB. Total cost to the customer: $349, versus $1,500+ quotes from dedicated data-recovery labs. Setup of a proper backup (3-2-1 rule) included so it never happens again.

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