After much head scratching and research I bought a Netgear SC101 Nas drive and stuck two hard drives in it, giving me a shed load of storage. I then installed the software and firmware updates, attached the drives to the PCs on my network and got music and videos streaming from it.

However, the main purpose of buying the kit was to use my Nas drive as a sort of off-site storage and backup solution, which would free up countless gigabytes of data from my main PC and server.

One day, while I was sorting files out, archiving data and doing the usual spring cleaning routine, I decided that a few files were no longer needed so deleted them. I then headed for the Recycle Bin to recover the file... but it's not there.

Frantically looking around for ways of backtracking and recovering this file that I accidentally deleted, I still couldn't find that file. I downloaded several bits of software that seemed like they would do a good recovery job but, several hours later, I got a "Results = 0" message.

After contacting Netgear support, I was referred to second-line tech support. I explained my dilemma of not being able to recover a deleted file to which the response was, "Yeah, that's because once you have deleted the file, you can't get it back due to the unique file system employed on the SC101". I asked, "Ok, so have you any tools to recover deleted files?" to which the response was, "No and we aren't developing any either."

Why on earth have so many people boasted about all the benefits of Nas drives if you can't do the most fundamental operations on it such as undelete? What good is a so-called backup/storage solution if when something goes wrong you can't undo it?

This problem may not be particularly important to the average user, but for people who are data safety aware I would personally think of an alternative solution before opting for a Nas.

Danny Leonard