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Longer answers

Six things asked on the freephone often enough to be worth answering at length and in public. Written by people who work the bench rather than by anybody reading from a sales script: plain wording, no invented urgency, and a real figure wherever money comes into it.

// business · 9 min read

What parity actually is, and why rebuilding a degraded RAID 5 is the most dangerous hour that array will ever have

A RAID 5 survives one dead disk by arithmetic, not by magic. Understanding that arithmetic explains why the rebuild — the thing everyone reaches for first — is exactly when the second disk tends to fail.

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// business · 9 min read

Five ways a backup fails silently — written from the bench the disks arrive at once the plan has already been tried

Nothing here is for sale. This is a recovery bench, not a backup provider, which makes it an unusually honest place to write about what actually goes wrong with backups in small businesses.

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// guides · 8 min read

Four jobs walked through end to end, showing exactly what moves a recovery from one band to the next — and what makes no difference at all

The price list is published elsewhere on this site. This is the other half of it: four ordinary jobs followed from the parcel to the invoice, so you can see which decisions actually move the number.

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// guides · 8 min read

Three generations of Mac, three completely different answers — work out which one you are holding before you do anything else

The honest answer to can you recover my Mac depends entirely on which machine it is, and the difference between the generations is total rather than a matter of degree. Thirty seconds of checking saves a lot of hope.

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// troubleshooting · 7 min read

A memory card that wants formatting has lost its index, not your photographs — and the next thirty seconds decide how many come back

A card is three separate things stacked together, and only the smallest of them breaks. Knowing which one explains why the warning is misleading, why the next click matters so much, and what a write-blocked copy can get back.

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// guides · 7 min read

Why a deleted file on a healthy SSD is usually gone within minutes — and the situations where it is not

Almost nobody in this trade publishes the honest version of this, because the honest version costs them work. On a working solid state drive with TRIM enabled, a deleted file is normally unrecoverable, and here is exactly why.

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Or hand it straight to an engineer

Diagnosis is free and closes 2 working days after your device books in at Cambridge, the quote is written down and fixed, and logical faults carry no fix, no fee. Begin online or ring the freephone.