A pair that quit in step, a resync pointed the wrong way, an enclosure that failed with two good disks shut inside — all recoverable positions. Each half is captured on its own, and your files are raised from whichever copy stands stronger.
No RAID quote is guesswork. Free diagnostic first, then one written figure — from £500 + VAT by member count, logical rebuilds under no fix, no fee.
A mirror makes one promise: survive a single dead disk. The list below walks clean past that promise, and every entry on it ends up here.
Mirror pairs come from the same order, power on the same morning and wear under the same load. Whatever claimed the first disk is usually a short way behind on the second — sometimes only days.
In two-bay NAS boxes and mirrored externals the bridge board or controller normally goes first, leaving two healthy disks shut inside a dead shell until each one is read out directly.
Swap the wrong member — or let the unit guess — and the blank or stale disk is copied straight over the good one: the mirror faithfully erasing the files it was built to protect.
A pair that limped along degraded at different times ends up holding two versions of the truth. Merge them carelessly and they ruin one another; image them separately and both get to contribute.
Deletion, corruption, a bad update, ransomware — a mirror's entire job is duplicating writes, so the damage lands on both members in the same instant.
A failed NAS firmware update or OS fault can brick the box around a perfectly good pair — the way back in is capturing each disk and raising the volume on other hardware.
From the first minute the two disks are treated as separate cases. Each half is captured on a hardware imager — clean-bench work first where one has physically failed — and the two captures are then weighed against each other: which carries more of your data, and the more recent state of it. The stronger image becomes the foundation, the weaker one donates what it can to fill holes, and the original pair never sees another write.
RAID 1 covers precisely one event: a single drive dying while the volume carries on. Everything else strolls through — a deletion or a poisoned update lands on both halves in the same instant, ransomware works through the pair in one sweep, and a dead enclosure takes both members off the air together. A broken mirror is therefore a proper recovery job, and the lesson it teaches is an old one: a backup that counts lives on different media, in a different place.
The pairs landing on this bench mostly come out of Synology, QNAP and Netgear two-bay units and small office servers, posted in from York, Ripon, Pocklington and Easingwold. Send both disks together to our Leeds location — a straightforward run down the A64, or next working day tracked. The bigger picture sits under RAID recovery and NAS recovery, and the numbers live on the data recovery cost page.
Both halves imaged, the stronger copy rebuilt — free diagnosis, then one written figure.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.