Search for 'IT data recovery' in York and you will find two different trades answering their phones. One of them is continuity specialists (who design failover, replicate servers and rehearse your worst week before it arrives) whilst the other is salvage (the engineers who get your files off the broken hardware). Continuity is planning, rehearsing, etc., whereas salvage is where the engineers take the particular broken component which has stopped working (server disk dead, NAS volume cannot be mounted, RAID has lost two disks), and get all your files from this piece of equipment.
We are the 'bench' and would prefer to tell you that early in our opening paragraphs as opposed to selling you a haze of confusion. No retainers, no standby infrastructure, no consultancy days, simply where your failed storage ends up at your request or from your IT firm after hardware has given way. These two areas do feed into one another; a well-rehearsed continuity plan typically means that most organisations will never meet with us, and this bench is the backup plan should the plan meet an actual Tuesday and lose.
The jobs that come in from working locations in York (the units on Clifton Moor, the offices near Monks Cross and all of the smaller businesses scattered throughout the yards and industrial areas along the A19 and A59) are not usually ones you would think about making movies about. In a RAID 5, a single hard drive fails in early March, no one notices, and then another fails during the rebuild in late August. A power outage hits the NAS behind the shared drive while it is writing. Ransomware hits the office the same week someone finally admits their backup job has been showing an error since spring. Each incident asks two things at the same time. It asks, "How do we trade tomorrow?", a continuity question for your IT staff to answer. And, "Who is going to pull this data off this hardware?", which is what this bench is here to answer.
York will add another question, and it is water. This is a city that has an abundance of flood boards at the front door: the Ouse is slow moving and floods quite wide, the Foss caught thousands of people out on Boxing Day 2015 when the barrier was overwhelmed, and every few winters there are cellars, back offices and ground-floor server cupboards between the rivers that take a soaking. A submerged hard drive or NAS can be recovered a great deal more often than you would think, as long as it is never turned back on. Do not dry a wet hard drive on a radiator. Do not test it after drying. It is electrical current running through the flood residue that causes the damage. Bag it damp, just as it was found. Get a quote before posting it to us: use our free online diagnostic tool, or call 0800 689 0668. Flood-damaged hardware is invasive work: the diagnostic is free as always, then 50% of the fixed quote is paid upfront for the bench work, with the balance only if we recover your data.
The majority of disasters recorded in the intake book for this bench could have been avoided years in advance by four good habits. Maintain at least three copies of everything critical, on two different types of storage, with one of them away from the building. Off-site should literally mean the copies have left your premises, not that they sit on a shelf above your servers. Prove a restore at least once per quarter, because a backup nobody has restored from is just a rumour with a schedule. Include in each new staff induction that RAID provides uptime through one hard disk failure, but protects against nothing else: not deletion, not ransomware, not the rivers, not a failed rebuild. Finally, write the plan down (asset list, storage diagram, who to call) because the individual who knows it all goes on holiday.
These same four "habits" provide the most affordable form of IT data recovery a York business can buy. Therefore, recommending them will cost this bench work every single time we do so. Nonetheless, we still suggest that they are adopted; there will never be a lack of hardware failures.
Turn off the machines before attempting heroics: power the affected storage down, prevent all rebuild attempts and repair utilities, and clearly mark each drive taken out with its respective slot number when it leaves the rack. Then call 0800 689 0668 using the words "business critical" and the case will be flagged during this call. Once you get a quote, post the drives in tracked and insured packaging (or hand them in at the Leeds lab's reception yourself, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment necessary) and the diagnostic will be prioritised and completed within two working days of the drives arriving. You will get a single fixed quote before any work is authorised, and the recovery can then run in phases, starting with working data and followed by archive.
If it will keep until tomorrow, the quickest way to get the details in front of an engineer is our free diagnostic. Explain how your system was set up, and we will give you a call to go over everything. More information about your specific hardware can be found on RAID recovery, NAS recovery and SAN recovery.
Put it right on the server room wall: an array is not an archive. RAID's sole purpose is to allow business as usual while waiting to replace a single failed hard drive. RAID does nothing to protect against data loss from deletion, ransomware, water damage or even a bad rebuild tomorrow.
We offer a free diagnostic within two working days of receiving your device, followed by one fixed quote. For logical faults, you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or ring the freephone.