Disaster recovery (DR) is preparation: the documented, rehearsed ability to bring your IT back after fire, flood, cyber attack or major hardware failure — standby kit, replicated servers, restore procedures that have actually been tested, and a contact sheet everyone can find. Data recovery is intervention: getting files off one specific dead device — the server disk that won't spin, the NAS volume that won't mount, the RAID array two drives down.
Businesses around Swansea search for both under the same wording, so we'll be precise about which side we sit on: the intervention. We don't sell DR consultancy, standby infrastructure or replication contracts — we're the lab that failed storage gets sent to, by you or your IT provider, when the component that was never supposed to die goes ahead and dies. The relationship runs both ways: a rehearsed DR plan keeps you away from us, and when the plan turns out to have a hole, we're what plugs it.
What actually arrives from businesses across Swansea Bay and the M4 corridor is rarely a flood story. It's the office RAID 5 dropping a second disk halfway through a rebuild. It's the NAS behind the shared drive refusing to mount after a power cut. It's ransomware taking the file server, followed by the discovery that the backups had been failing quietly since spring. Each time, two questions run in parallel — 'how does the business run this week?' (that's DR) and 'how do the files come off this dead hardware?' (that's us).
We take the second question. Business-critical cases are flagged and prioritised the moment they arrive, courier collection from Swansea and the surrounding towns is easy to arrange, and we slot in alongside your IT provider without fuss — they rebuild on new hardware while we extract from the old. The specifics live on RAID recovery, NAS recovery and SAN recovery.
Most 'disasters' are preventable with four habits. Keep 3-2-1 — hold three copies of everything important, across two different storage types, with one copy living off-site or in the cloud. Restore something every quarter — an untested backup is a wish, and quietly broken backups are the most common confession we hear from businesses mid-crisis. Repeat internally until it sticks: RAID keeps you running, it doesn't keep you backed up — it survives one drive, not deletion, ransomware, fire or a botched rebuild. And write the plan down: where data lives and who to ring, because the colleague who knows it all will be on annual leave that week.
Those twenty minutes are the best-value disaster recovery service available in Swansea — advice we hand out freely as the people you'd otherwise be paying.
Power the affected storage down and call a halt to heroics — a rebuild pushed onto failing disks, or a repair utility loosed on a corrupted volume, is how a recoverable incident becomes a write-off. Removed drives get labelled by bay. Then ring 0800 689 0668, say the words 'business-critical', and we'll organise the rest: courier collection, a diagnostic that's prioritised on arrival and complete within 2 working days, and one fixed quote before any work.
If it can wait, start with the free online diagnostic instead and we'll come straight back to you by phone.
RAID is availability, not backup. It survives a single drive failing — nothing else. Not deletion, not corruption, not ransomware, not fire, not a rebuild gone wrong. A large share of our business work begins exactly there.
Free diagnostic on arrival, one fixed quote, no fix no fee on logical faults — start online or pick up the freephone.