Disaster recovery (DR) is a plan: your documented ability to get IT running again after a fire, flood, cyber attack or major outage — standby systems, replicated servers, tested restore procedures and a phone list everyone can reach for. Data recovery is surgery: pulling the files off one specific failed device — the dead server disk, the crashed NAS volume, the RAID array that has lost two drives.
Staines businesses search for both under the same handful of phrases, so let's be clear about which we are: we are the surgery. We don't sell DR consultancy or standby infrastructure — we are the lab your IT provider (or you) ships failed storage to when the thing that was never meant to fail does exactly that. The two are complementary: a solid DR plan means you rarely need us, and when the plan springs a gap, we are what closes it.
The pattern we see across Surrey and Spelthorne: the 'disaster' isn't a flood, it is an ordinary Tuesday. The office server's RAID 5 loses a second disk mid-rebuild. The NAS holding the shared drive won't mount after a power cut. Ransomware locks the file server, and the backups turn out to have been failing quietly for months. In every case the DR question ('how do we keep trading this week?') and the data-recovery question ('how do we get the files off this hardware?') run side by side.
Our job is the second question, answered quickly: business-critical cases are worked ahead of the queue the moment they arrive, same-day courier collection from Staines can be arranged, and we are happy to run alongside your IT provider — they rebuild the infrastructure on new kit while we lift the data off the old. See RAID recovery, NAS recovery and SAN recovery for the specifics.
You don't need an enterprise DR programme to dodge most disasters. Stick to 3-2-1: three copies of anything important, on two different kinds of storage, with one held off-site or in the cloud. Test a restore every quarter — a backup you have never restored from is a hope, not a backup, and silently failed backups are the single most common story we hear from businesses in trouble. Treat RAID as availability, not backup — it survives one drive dying, not deletion, ransomware, fire or a rebuild that goes wrong. And write down where everything lives and who to call, because the one person who knows is invariably on holiday when it all goes sideways.
Twenty minutes spent on that list is the cheapest disaster recovery service in Staines — and we will happily say so, as the people you would otherwise be paying to fix it.
Power down the affected storage and stop anyone from 'having a quick go' — rebuilds onto failing drives and repair utilities let loose on corrupted volumes are exactly how recoverable incidents become unrecoverable ones. If you pull drives, label them by bay. Then call 0800 689 0668, tell us it is business-critical, and we will take it from there — courier collection, a prioritised diagnostic within 48 hours of arrival, a fixed quote and no fix, no fee.
Not urgent? Begin with the free online diagnostic and we will call you back the same working day.
RAID is not a backup. It guards against a single drive failing — not deletion, corruption, ransomware, theft, fire or a rebuild gone wrong. Half of our business recovery work begins with this one sentence.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.