I can’t make any specific recommendations because I haven’t lost a hard drive since switching from WD hard drives to Toshiba hard drives almost a decade ago, I don’t use RAID, and I have three backup copies of everything.
However, I can probably point you in the right direction. Start by searching for anything pertaining to the WD My Book Live drive wipe incident that happened in the summer of 2021. The forums are filled with information about what people did to recover their data. The NAS device was different, but the Linux EX4 partion format makes it more than relevant.
Be very cautious, because the incident was a magnet for data recovery vultures seeking to take advantage of desperate users who didn’t have backups.
