Case Study

How 58TB of Critical Video Footage Was Successfully Recovered from a RAID 0 NAS

Published On : Sep 30, 2025

A major media production team faced every editor’s nightmare: almost 60 terabytes of important video files disappeared from their shared storage system.

These were not ordinary files. Each video had been shot in high-quality RAW format, with single files often over 100GB in size.

Re-shooting the scenes was impossible because the footage included rare interviews and unique live events.

This situation was urgent.

The media house used a Linux-based NAS made up of four 16TB hard drives, set up in RAID 0 for fast editing and transfers.

Note: RAID 0 is popular in the media industry for its speed, but it has one major weakness: if any drive fails or data is deleted, there is no redundancy. This means nothing is backed up within the system. This is why professional RAID data recovery services become critical when handling data loss from RAID setups.

System at a Glance

Drives: Four 16TB drives, totaling 64TB of storage capacity.
RAID: The drives were configured in a RAID 0 NAS. This is a special setup that combines the drives to create a single, massive, and very fast storage volume. It's great for speed, which is why media professionals use it, but it's risky because if one drive fails or data is lost on one drive, the entire array becomes useless.
File System: The drives used the Ext4 file system, which is common in Linux.
File Types: The files were very large video clips, each over 100GB, in professional formats like .BRAW (Blackmagic RAW) and .ARW (Sony Alpha RAW).

What Went Wrong

The issue began when several large video files were accidentally deleted during routine file management. To make matters worse, new files were written to the NAS soon after, which meant some of the deleted data could have been overwritten.

Note: This double risk of deletion and overwriting makes data recovery especially difficult. On Linux, the ext4 file system (used here) removes information about deleted files from its directory and inode records. If new data is written on top of that space, recovery becomes even less likely.

Why Media Files Are Hard to Recover

Large RAW video files, like those from Blackmagic cameras, are typically over 100GB each. These files need to be as complete as possible. Even a small amount of missing or corrupted data can make them unplayable or uneditable.

The Recovery Process (What Stellar Data Recovery Team Did)

Step 1: Imaging

The first thing our engineers did was to create a perfect, bit-by-bit copy of all four drives. This approach is critical to risk-free data recovery as our team can work on the copies, and in doing so, protect the originals from further harm.

Step 2: Rebuilding the RAID

Even though the metadata (the map of where files are located) was gone, we used special tools to virtually rebuild the RAID 0 array. This allowed us to treat the four drives as a single volume again.

Step 3: File Carving

Once the array was reconstructed, our engineers used a technique called file carving. Instead of looking for the file's location on the disk, they scanned the entire drive for the unique digital "signatures" of .BRAW and .ARW files. This allowed them to find and recover files even without their original file system information.

Step 4: Video Repair

Finally, our engineers used their knowledge of professional video formats to repair the recovered files. They fixed the headers and other corrupted parts of the video clips to make them playable.

Outcome

Total Data Recovered: 56.8TB out of 58.17TB
Files Restored: Most critical video files, project files, and related data
Timeframe: 5 days from drive intake to recovery
Result: The production was able to continue editing with almost no loss. Only a few non-essential clips were not fully recoverable due to overwriting.

What You Can Learn From This Case Study

RAID 0 is high-speed but high-risk. Always keep separate backups, especially for critical footage.

If you delete important files, stop using the storage immediately. New data can permanently overwrite what you want to recover.

Professional data recovery is your best chance. DIY tools often cannot handle the scale and complexity of RAID or video file recovery.

This case shows that even after accidental deletion and overwriting, careful and systematic data recovery can bring back almost all essential media files

Check Out More of Our Success Stories for RAID:

Business Need

The production house urgently needed to recover critical video files containing rare interviews and live events. As the data got accidentally deleted, reshooting those events was not an option.

Solution Approach

After inspection we created disk images for a risk-free data recovery. After that we used specialized tools to rebuild the RAID, followed by file carving and finally repaired the video files.

Result

We successfully recovered the video footage withing the promised deadline, ensuring the client received all the required data.

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