Disaster recovery covers two trades. One writes the plan and sells the replication; this is the other one, the bench that gets the data back when the plan turns out to have a gap in it. This page sets out the four failures that actually arrive here from Leicestershire, what to do in the first hour, what can honestly be said about downtime, and what each band costs.
Servers and arrays start at £500 + VAT; a single drive is £300 + VAT. The diagnostic that produces the figure is free and closes two working days after the media is booked in. Ransomware is priced as ordinary media, not as forensic work.
The disaster in a disaster recovery plan is rarely a fire. In practice, four things account for nearly every emergency that reaches this bench from Leicestershire, and three of them happen on an ordinary Tuesday.
A member failed months ago, the alert went to somebody who has left, and the array carried on degraded until a second disk went. The volume disappears, the server is still humming, and the last verified backup is older than anybody wants to admit. This is the most common business disaster there is.
It usually arrives at the weekend and is discovered on Monday. Disconnect the affected machines immediately, do not reinstall over anything, and do not reformat the file server. Recovery works on what the malware missed, on originals it deleted rather than overwrote, and on earlier versions. Priced as ordinary media.
A volume removed during a migration, a share deleted at half past four, a LUN detached from the wrong host, an array re-created to see whether it would come back. Nearly all of it is reversible if the machine is powered off promptly and nothing new is written to the storage.
A burst pipe above a comms cupboard, a flooded basement office, a fire that was extinguished thoroughly. Do not power anything up to check, and do not dry the electronics. Sealed and sent in damp, storage from a flood recovers far more often than storage that somebody switched on to test.
Discovered at the worst possible moment: a job that failed silently since the spring, a NAS backing itself up to itself, a cloud sync that faithfully replicated the encryption to every machine. A copy nobody has restored from is not yet a backup, and this is where that gets proved.
No drama at all. A power cut corrupts a database, a controller dies, a virtual machine will not boot, a disk starts clicking. Undramatic, business-stopping, and the bulk of the work here. It is a recovery job rather than an insurance claim, and it is quoted before anything is done.
Worth being clear at the top, because the phrase disaster recovery covers two different trades. One writes your continuity plan, sizes your recovery objectives, sells you replication and tests the failover. That is a valuable service and it is not this one. What happens here is the other half: when the storage has actually failed and the plan turns out to have a gap in it, the disks come to a bench and the data is got back off them.
This site does not sell backup software, hosted replication or managed IT. If your question is how to stop this happening again, the honest answer is a proper backup with a restore you have personally tested, held somewhere the same event cannot reach, and that advice is free. If your question is what to do about the server that stopped this morning, that is what the rest of this page covers.
Stop writing to the affected storage. That means powering the machine down properly if it is safe to do so, not leaving it running while people carry on working, and certainly not restoring a backup on top of it until you know whether the backup is good.
Work out which layer has failed. A machine that will not power on is a hardware fault and the storage inside it is usually untouched. A machine that runs and cannot see its array is a controller or array fault. A machine that presents a volume it cannot mount is a file system fault. Each has a different right answer and the wrong one is expensive.
Do not rebuild, initialise, reformat or re-create anything while the only copy of the data is on the affected storage. Every one of those writes.
Write down the sequence of events while it is fresh — what failed, when, what was tried, in what order. Two paragraphs of accurate history routinely save a day of laboratory work on a multi-disk job.
Then ring. The freephone is answered during working hours and the job can be flagged before the parcel arrives, which puts it at the front of the diagnostic queue on arrival.
Nobody can quote a recovery time from a phone description, and a firm that does is guessing at your expense. What is fixed: the diagnostic is free, it closes two working days after the media is booked in, and it comes with a written price and a realistic date. Single drives usually finish two to four working days after authorisation. Arrays take longer because each member is imaged separately.
If the business genuinely cannot wait, plan around the media rather than around the lab. Get the users onto something else, restore whatever partial backup exists to new hardware, and treat the recovery as the route to the gap rather than the route to the whole system. That is how the businesses that come out of this well handle it.
Insurers, auditors and solicitors sometimes want more than the files back. A forensic investigation with a full written report is £800 + VAT and produces a document that stands up to being read by people who were not in the room. A forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report is £400 + VAT, which is the same figure as the recorder and encrypted-media band rather than a separate tier of its own.
Most disasters need neither. A failed array, a deleted volume, a ransomware run across the shares — those are ordinary recovery work and are quoted in the ordinary bands. Ransomware in particular is priced as media, from £500 + VAT for an array and £300 + VAT for a single drive. It is not forensic work and charging it as such would be indefensible.
Servers, RAID arrays, NAS units and SAN volumes start at £500 + VAT and rise with the number of member disks. A single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. A CCTV or DVR recorder disk is £400 + VAT, and so is an encrypted volume where the key can be supplied. Every figure is quoted in writing after the free diagnostic and nothing starts before you agree it.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee: failed arrays with healthy members, deleted volumes, corrupt file systems, ransomware. The exclusions are electronic failures, mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs, and physical work takes 50 per cent of the quoted figure upfront before the invasive stage begins.
Servers and arrays send their member disks only, labelled with their bay order, with a photograph of the front of the chassis taken beforehand. Leave the chassis, the controller and the power supplies with you. A NAS travels whole with its disks in place. An external drive stays in its enclosure. A laptop, desktop or recorder sends its drive alone.
Post it tracked and insured, or bring it in during working hours: Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. It is roughly 70 miles from Leicester, the M1 south to J19 and then east on the A14, about ninety minutes, and the building is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Nobody collects and there is no Leicester office.
The businesses that ring from this county are much of a muchness: a manufacturer near Loughborough whose production records live on one server, a logistics operator at Magna Park with a warehouse system nobody dares reboot, an accountancy practice in the city centre in the week before a filing deadline, a design studio in the Cultural Quarter with fifteen years of artwork on a four-bay box in a cupboard, a school or academy trust with a single file server. None of them thought of themselves as having a disaster recovery problem until the Tuesday morning they did.
The businesses that come out of these well are the ones that powered the storage down and rang, rather than the ones that kept trying things.
A padded box and a tracked label do more for a struggling disk than any amount of driving around with it. Royal Mail Special Delivery handed over in Leicester in the afternoon is generally on the Cambridge bench the following working morning, which is faster than most people manage in person.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.