A disaster recovery (DR) plan is a business's documented plan of action to get its IT running again after an emergency (fire, flood, cyber attack or major outage), with standby systems, replicated servers, tested restore procedures and a phone list everyone can reach for. Data recovery is like 'surgery' on a single piece of equipment that has failed: recovering the files from one failed unit such as a dead server disk, a crashed NAS volume, or a RAID set where two drives have failed.
Businesses in Staines look for both services using very similar searches, so we want to clarify which service we provide: we are the "surgery". We don't sell DR consultancy or standby infrastructure. We are the lab that your IT provider (or you) posts failed storage to when the thing that was never meant to fail does exactly that. The two are complementary: a good DR plan should minimise how often our services are required, and if your DR plan falls short, we act as the "gap filler".
The pattern we see across Surrey and Spelthorne: the 'disaster' isn't actually about flooding. It's just another Tuesday. The office server's RAID 5 loses its second disk mid-rebuild. The NAS holding the shared drive refuses to mount after a power cut. The file server is locked by ransomware, and the backups turn out to have been failing for months with no-one noticing. In every case, the two questions run in parallel: the DR one (how do we keep trading this week?) and the data recovery one (how do we get the files off this hardware?).
That is our job: the second question, answered quickly. Business-critical cases are worked ahead of the queue as soon as they arrive. Drives posted tracked from Staines are on the bench the next working day. We're happy to work alongside your own IT provider: they build your new infrastructure on new hardware whilst we recover the data from your old hardware. For further details, look at RAID recovery, NAS recovery and SAN recovery.
If you stick to 3-2-1 (three copies of your data, on two types of media, with one copy stored off-site or in the cloud), you can skip the enterprise-level disaster recovery programme for most disasters. Test restoring at least once per quarter, as a backup you've never restored from is a wish, not a backup. The number one problem we see in businesses in trouble: backups that failed silently. Use RAID to increase uptime (it survives the loss of a disk), but don't rely on it as a backup (it doesn't survive deletion, ransomware, fire or a rebuild gone wrong). And write down what lives where and who to call when things go bad, because the one person who knows is invariably on holiday.
Twenty minutes spent making this list? That's the cheapest disaster recovery service in Staines. We'll even tell you that ourselves, as the people you'd otherwise be paying to fix it.
Shut down the affected storage system immediately; no-one should attempt anything else with it, as rebuilding across failing drives and running repair utilities across damaged volumes can easily turn a recoverable incident into an unrecoverable one. If you pull out any drives, mark each one with the bay it was in. Phone 0800 689 0668 and tell us your issue is business-critical. We'll take care of everything from there: sending instructions, a priority diagnostic within 2 working days of arrival, a fixed price quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
Not urgent? Begin with the free online diagnostic and we'll ring you back the same working day.
RAID does not constitute a backup. RAID protects against the failure of one hard drive; it cannot protect against deletion, corruption, ransomware, theft, fire or rebuild errors. Approximately half of all our business recovery work starts with this one sentence.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.