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How to access a SATA disk from a NAS using the Linux XFS file system
Recovering Data From An XFS diskdrive on Mac OS (Catalina)
In this article I will show you a proven way on how to retrieve data from a XFS file-system based NAS station — like the Netgear Stora that I once purchased — using Mac OS (Catalina) so you can access your bits & bytes and copy them to another location.
Keeping Your Data Safe
Every year, while mobile phone camera’s and action cams get better and better, the size of the content that we create with them (like photos and vids) keeps increasing too.
I once was confident to state that a good NAS keeps your data safe and that it will keep you going for years. I was right, as I enjoyed the little Netgear Stora NAS.
Until it got deprecated somewhere in 2018 and support got suspended. It even has a paid cloud service that let you access the drive from anywhere. But it will be deactivated April 1st in 2020.
I could have gone and copied all the data as soon as I noticed that the Mac OS apps didn’t function on Mac OS Sierra anymore (Netgear didn’t upgrade the apps to support the 64 bit architecture), but I could access things using FTP and was still using it that way. That, and I was lazy.
When Bits Hit The Fan
I noticed I couldn’t connect to my NAS anymore, and checking it out quickly showed me it didn’t fire up anymore.
The CPU was dead (probably by collecting too much near the fuse box) and the only way for me was to hope that I could access the drives in it (two 1Tb 3,5" harddisks, set to operate with RAID 1) directly.
After some research (Google) and diving into some Netgear forums, I learned that the operating system used the Linux XFS Journaling Filesystem. It appears that a lot of Linux distributions use and/or support the filesystem as well.
