Thursday 2nd January 2014 it had been the first full day back of all the R3 Data Recovery team after a partial shutdown over the Christmas period, and it turned out to be the busiest of the year so far! In reality the New Year is always busy, holiday and shutdown periods always result in additional workload but combined with storms and floods around the UK, this particular day turned into one where within 24 hours A Server, 2 flood damaged drives, several laptops including a Macbook Pro with a shorted SSD Drive were collected in by our couriers and by our own staff and recovered within the time frames and budgets quoted.
After a busy day recovering drives, sending out recovered data file lists and booking in new work, it came down to R3 staff to help in the return of some very sensitive business critical data during the evening.
Whilst en route Andy and Martin were notified of an out of hours call and possible emergency. The potential client like many in his situation found he could not access important files needed to manage his servers and was in distress and understandably frustrated in his online search to find a reputable hard drive repair specialist within London in his hour of need.
The client had all but resigned himself that the data was unrecoverable because not only was the drive failing but he had encrypted the data and had no access to email and his online searches and research had him unsure who he could entrust his critical data with.
Despite R3’s main lab being in Sheffield and only receiving the call mid evening Andy as passenger was able to manage the clients enquiry by text and mobile phone, and make arrangements to collect the drive at 00:45 am in London and by 04.25am the drive was already on an emergency recovery system in their main Sheffield lab, and despite being very badly degraded and impossible to recover every sector, the drive image produced enabled the truecrypt password to be entered and the data accessed.
Martin despite being a relatively new driver was able to complete the round trip within 7 hours despite Andy’s co driving mistake close to Brent Cross adding 15 minutes to the journey and delay collection to 1am.
Martin and Andy were back in the lab for 4am, drive diagnosed and the recovery commenced before getting a few hours sleep, they we back at their desks for 9am and another day of managing the new year disaster recovery needs of dozens of businesses and individuals around the UK.
A very relieved client was kind enough to write his own experience: http://www.thinlinedata.com/data-recovery-company-data-recovers/
