Disaster recovery (DR) involves preparation: you have documented and practised plans in place for bringing your IT systems back online after disasters such as fire, flood, cyber attacks or major hardware failures. This includes having a standby kit of devices, replicating your servers, restore processes which have actually been tested and a contact list that everyone can find. Data recovery is about intervention: getting files off one specific failed piece of equipment, i.e. a server disk that will not spin, a NAS volume that cannot be mounted, a RAID array with two drives down.
Businesses in Swansea search for both using the same keywords, so we will be precise about which of the two sides we are on: the intervention. We do not provide DR consultancy, standby infrastructure or replication contracts; we are the lab where your failed storage gets sent (by you, or your IT provider), after the component that was never intended to fail goes ahead and fails. The relationship works two-way: a well-rehearsed DR plan will keep you from needing to use us, but if there is a hole in the plan we can help fill the hole.
What actually arrives from businesses in Swansea Bay or along the M4 corridor is rarely a story of flooding. Instead we receive the office RAID 5 dropping a second disk mid-rebuild. We see the NAS behind the shared drive fail to mount after a power outage. We see ransomware take down the file server on top of finding out that the backups had been failing silently since spring. Each time there are two questions running in parallel: 'How will the business run this week?' (that's DR), and 'How do the files come off of that dead hardware?' (that's us).
We will address the second of the questions posed. All business-critical recoveries are flagged as such when received by us, and priority is then given to them straight away. Once you receive your quotation, a tracked parcel sent from anywhere around Swansea will be with us the next working day (or drop the hard drives off at our lab in Bristol, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed); we can then work alongside your IT provider without fuss, who will rebuild on the new hardware, whilst we retrieve the data from the original. The details are available here: RAID recovery, NAS recovery and SAN recovery.
Most 'disasters' are preventable by developing four habits. Keep 3-2-1: three copies of everything important to you, across two different storage types, with one copy living off-site or in the cloud. Restore something once per quarter: an untested backup is a wish, and quietly broken backups are the most common confession we get from businesses in the middle of a crisis. Repeat it internally until it sticks: RAID keeps you running, it doesn't keep you backed up. RAID survives one drive failing, but it doesn't protect you from deletion, ransomware, fire or a botched rebuild. And write the plan down: where data lives and who to call, because the colleague who knows it all will be on annual leave that week.
These twenty minutes will give you the most valuable disaster recovery service available in Swansea for the money, advice we're happy to hand out freely as the people you would otherwise have been paying.
Power down the impacted storage unit and end heroic actions: rebuilding data onto failing disks, or running a repair tool against a corrupted volume, is how a recoverable incident becomes a write-off. Once you've removed the disks (labelling each with its respective drive bay), call 0800 689 0668 and state that it is 'business-critical'; all of the remaining details will be covered in that call, including your quote, the drives to send to us and packaging information. The initial diagnostic will be given priority upon receipt and completed within 2 working days. Prior to commencing any work, there will be just one single fixed quote.
If it can wait, use the free online diagnostic first instead. We'll get straight back to you on the phone after you do.
A RAID is an availability solution, not a backup solution. It's going to survive if one of your drives fails, nothing else. Not deletion, not corrupt data, not ransomware, not fire, not a failed rebuild. This is where a large share of our business work begins.
We offer a free diagnostic on arrival, one fixed quote, and on logical faults, in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Please begin online or call us using our freephone number.