If you have a deadline that has been set or if your business has stopped, then priority handling could be of use to you. This will move your case up in order of importance and keep it at the top until we resolve the issue. However, this will not expedite how quickly your donor part can be located nor the amount of time it will take to safely access your failed hard drive. Here is where speed can help you and when it may not.
In an emergency situation your job will jump the normal queue as soon as possible (and we will provide updates throughout this process).
Your best action, and cheapest, is to power off and disconnect the drive or system, and not to attempt any further copies, scans or repairs.
While both situations can cause stress they are two very different things; and we would encourage honesty in identifying whether you have experienced a genuine emergency versus mere frustration.
This is one area where a direct answer can save money.
Prioritising jobs will move yours to the top of the queue and keep it in priority position. The process, however, has no impact on the physical aspects of the drive. No matter what you are willing to pay, a drive needing a donor head-stack still requires the right donor to be sourced. For example, if an out-of-stock replacement component is needed and is going to take two days to arrive then it will be two days before it arrives whether or not you paid extra to have your drive moved to the top of the priority list. It would take as long to image a failing disk as the disk itself will allow. Pushing this imaging process faster can result in loss of recoverable data and we will not perform this action.
The important question here then is what happens to the time in your specific situation when it comes to logical faults and/or faulty drives. With a logical fault (and good hardware) priority scheduling can truly shrink days down to hours. In mechanically failed drives, it mainly eliminates the queue and while this is certainly beneficial, users are sometimes expecting some type of transformation they do not get. At the diagnostic we will be able to tell you which of these occurred.
Listed in order from the greatest amount of difference made to the smallest amount of difference made.
Especially if you hear any unusual noises. A clicky drive degenerates by the minute; and the one factor that has the largest impact on the final outcome is how many minutes it ran after the symptom started occurring.
A backup/recovery scan on a bad drive is literally hours of the exact worst kind of stress for the drive; and often it will never complete.
When a RAID degrades, a rebuild writes to all the members and is typically the most common way a recoverable RAID becomes an unrecoverable RAID.
An initial conversation of approximately five minutes can tell if there really is urgency, and whether anything needs to be sent or even go anywhere at all, and this alone may save one full working day.
Better to send in the least amount possible (as opposed to sending everything), as it is quicker to post, less likely to get lost, and faster to begin work on. External hard drives are the exception; they need to be shipped complete. For a NAS, please remove the internal disks if possible.
The same fixed-price quotation method is used; however, the turnaround time is agreed upon prior to commencing.
All standard work begins with a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic; typical turnaround from when the customer has approved the diagnosis is 3 to 4 working days for a single drive. Priority service reduces the turnaround time and is quoted alongside the recovery service itself; therefore, customers receive two quotes prior to making a decision. Recovery services for a single drive range from £300 +VAT and recovery services for RAID, NAS and servers range from £500 +VAT.
If the diagnostic indicates that increased speed will have no significant effect on the outcome of the job, then we will advise you accordingly instead of charging a premium. Business hours are 9am to 5:30pm, Monday to Friday.
Send the unit in for the complimentary diagnostics with a short note on what happened; when we review the unit, an engineer will write up your quote prior to beginning any work.
Please obtain a quote from us by phone or using our quote form prior to sending/dropping off your unit. Your journey toward recovering your data begins as soon as your unit arrives with us. Once you have wrapped your unit securely, included all pertinent information about yourself (name, postal address, phone number and e-mail), simply ship it on. After your complimentary diagnostics are complete, we will provide you with written confirmation of the exact cost of your recovery prior to commencing with any work.
Is sending via post your preference? In this case, we can suggest sending with a trackable and insured service. Do you prefer to deliver the item personally? Come visit us Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm. No appointment required. Just be sure to prepare the device prior to visiting as outlined above.
Would you like some additional information up front? On the provided form please describe your problem in greater detail; one of our engineers will then assess your issue and provide a customised quote based on their assessment.
A reply will follow shortly. Anything urgent, call 01865 593000.
Most commonly asked questions during time-sensitive situations.
Cases involving genuine urgency include a halted operation, a pre-determined date for completion, and an ongoing overwrite of data, i.e., a CCTV system looping or an active write to the volume. It may be disconcerting to have a hard drive sitting idle within a drawer; however, at the same time, it is also not continuing to deteriorate and is best served under normal handling conditions.
The queue is removed; in cases of logical faults with healthy hardware, that can compress what would take days into hours. But it will never be able to alter the laws of physics. Sourcing a donor head stack takes as long as it takes, and imaging a failing drive can only run at the speed the drive will tolerate (pushing that is how data is lost).
Shut down the system and leave it off, especially if it has an abnormal noise. In most cases the largest factor affecting the result is how many hours you allowed a failed drive to continue operating before turning it off. This factor is totally under your control.
Not if it is making noise, because a backup represents hours of continuous read activity (the same type of stress that enlarges the failure), which often stops halfway through. Send it to be evaluated rather than wasting the remaining amount of read activity creating a backup that may never finish.
The diagnostic is free. It typically takes 48 hours for us to contact you after receiving your device. We usually take three to four working days to complete a single drive (from the point at which you approve the quote). However, if there are time constraints and urgency is involved, we can expedite this process and quote for it alongside the recovery, so you see both prices before deciding.
Once again, the data recovery costs depend on whether or not you need to recover a single drive (from £300 + VAT) or RAID, NAS or server (from £500 + VAT), and priority recovery is quoted in addition to the recovery price. We will let you know if paying for priority recovery would be unlikely to produce a different result, rather than charging you for the service.
Simply explain to us what has occurred and we will put your emergency job into our queue as a priority. Prior to commencing the recovery of your data, we will outline the steps we intend to take to recover your data and provide you with a written quote.