Buffalo LinkStation NAS LS220D Raid 1 Accidentally Deleted

[GeoDiaz]

MAJOR FAIL! Yes, I was a fool.

My Buffalo LinkStation LS220D had a 2 drive RAID 1 array.

It showed Drive 1 was healthy, but Drive 2 had failed. The LinkStation allowed me to format Drive 2 and it came back healthy. However, I was not able to do anything with Drive 2. I could not remove Drive 2 from the array and I saw no way to rebuild the mirror.

I could not do anything with Drive 2 or the array. I opted to removed the whole Array, expecting it to treat the 2 drives as a JBOD (with the data still on Drive 1 and an empty disk on Drive 2) so I could rebuild the RAID 1 with the data on Drive 1. I have broken software mirrors many times and that was my experience with this situation.

To my horror, once the array was removed, Drive 1 had no data. Instead of removing the mirroring and leaving the drives alone, it formatted both drives. Come to find out (after the fact) that the Buffalo LinkStation handles files in a RAID 1 in a "unique" way and does not behave like most other software RAID 1.

I now have Drive 1 connected to a Windows PC via USB and I am running a 8-9 hour scan on it with R-Studio Demo (Settings: XFS and all EXT types, and extra file types with all files types selected).

If it is recoverable I will purchase R-Studio, however I am not sure how to do the recovery itself. I have read that I may loose all the file names and folder structure due to the way the Buffalo LinkStation "handles files". Total nightmare, but I have some hope.

I found this post from 2020 viewtopic.php?f=22&t=11017&hilit=buffalo where the advise was to do a "Straight recovery against a single drive" with no further information.

The user posted that that was successful, so I assume he got the data back intact. I am going to reach out to him now,

If anyone can provide some guidance, please let me know.

[Alt]

How long did the NAS rebuild (not format!) the new RAID1? If for a short time, you have some hope. If for a long time, the NAS may have overwritten the old data creating the new RAID1.