Disaster recovery (DR) refers to having plans in place for getting your company's technology back up and running after a fire, flood, cyber attack or other major failure: standby systems, servers with data replicated across them, tested processes for restoring data, and a number for everyone involved to call. Data recovery is the actual surgery: recovering files from one specific failed piece of hardware, such as a dead server drive, a crashed NAS volume or a RAID array that has lost two disks.
Sheffield companies search for both of these services using the same search terms, so to clarify: we are the data recovery service. Our company does not provide DR consultancy, and we do not provide standby or temporary replacement systems. What we do is accept failed storage from your IT provider (or you) after something has happened that was never supposed to happen. The two work in conjunction with each other. A good disaster recovery plan will reduce the number of times you need to contact us to recover data. When there is a gap in your disaster recovery plan, this is where our service comes in.
The pattern we've seen with businesses in South Yorkshire is that 'the disaster' isn't a flood but a Tuesday. A RAID 5 on the office server loses its second disk while rebuilding. The NAS holding the shared drive won't mount after an unplanned power loss. Ransomware encrypts the file server, and the backups turn out to have been failing silently for months. In all cases the question of how to keep trading (DR) and the question of how to recover your files from this hardware (data recovery) run at the same time.
Our role is the second of these questions, done quickly: business-critical cases are prioritised on arrival, and tracked next-morning post from anywhere in Sheffield gets the media onto a bench. We also happily work alongside your IT supplier, who rebuilds the infrastructure on new hardware while we recover the data from the old. For the specifics, see RAID recovery, NAS recovery and SAN recovery.
You don't have to be an enterprise with a disaster recovery programme to prevent most disasters. Follow 3-2-1: three copies of your important data, on two different types of storage, with at least one copy kept off-site or in the cloud. Test a restore quarterly: if you've never restored from your backups, they are just hopes and wishes, and silent backup failure is the most common thing we hear from businesses that have had a disaster. And remember RAID is not a backup. RAID protects you if one drive fails, but it won't help with deletion, ransomware, fire or a failed rebuild. Lastly, write down where everything lives and who to call, because the person who knows will always be on holiday when the crisis happens.
Twenty minutes on that list is the least expensive disaster recovery service in Sheffield, and we say so as the people you would otherwise be sending money to.
Power off the failed storage and stop anyone else from having a go: rebuilding onto drives that have already started to fail, or running a repair utility on a corrupted volume, is how an incident moves from recoverable to unrecoverable. If you take the drives out, label each one with the bay it came from. Then call 0800 689 0668 and let us know it is critical to your business. We will guide you through packing and posting the drives safely. A prioritised diagnostic will be done within two working days of the drives arriving, and a fixed price quotation will follow. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
No rush? Take the first step using our free online diagnostic, and we will call you back the same working day.
RAID is not a backup. RAID provides redundancy in case one drive fails. However, it provides no protection against accidental deletion, corrupted files, ransomware, theft, fire or a rebuild that goes wrong. About half of our business recovery work begins by telling customers exactly this.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote and, in most cases, you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.