Busy New Year in The Office

12/01/2014 By

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/

Filed Under: Data Recovery

R3 Data Recovery Ltd – The most Successful and Productive Data Recovery Company in the UK

25/09/2013 By

R3 Data RecoveryAndy Butler announces increased imaging capacity to enable more drives to be recovered every month.

This new round of investment helps R3  to improve throughput and efficiency at both it Northern and Southern labs. The addition of a further 10 state of the art imaging units and a further 6 data validation systems along with increased recovery server storage capacity has added a further 30% production capability and is designed to restore the flexibility a data recovery lab needs to provide all service levels and client needs at a price to fit their budget.

After a summer of running at full capacity after regional power outages and adverse weather used up spare capacity normally set aside for emergency and budget services this significant additional investment is designed to ensure R3 remains the first choice for data recovery in the UK.

Andy explains how his data recovery labs maintain their class leading success rates whilst helping keep costs down.

“Tthe problem with data recovery is some situations may require a data recovery engineers time for a matter of minutes or a few hours restoring a failed drive to an operational state, but what sets our complete service apart is the quality of the recovery and our willingness to go that extra mile for our clients even on budget services , overnight or at weekends.

By automating the bad sector recovery and imaging / cloning aspect of the data recovery process we maximise the efficiency  of the technicians and maintain true low cost, industry leading success rates.”

R3 offer upfront data recovery fees which are often undercut but never undersold. “around 10% of our monthly throughput are drives which were sent to other companies which quote a sub £150 price for work which cannot be done properly on a regular basis for less than £250 ”

The problem with cheap data recovery is RISK – software only operations fail to protect the clients drives and in doing so put the data at risk and reduce the chance of a full recovery or the quality especially for drives with unreadable sectors.

“By adding extra imaging capacity we bring back the spare production required for emergencies to ensure our 6,12,24 and 48 hr turnaround options are met even on weekends and that we chase every bad sector and in doing so get data back that has been declared unrecoverable or corrupted.”

During early September  there were 6 emergencies carried out over a Friday lunchtime to Sunday morning including a failed RAID5  server brought in from Paris which was won on a recommendation from another company R3 had saved from a data disaster during early 2013.

“We coordinated collection from Paris at lunchtime, it was in our lab for 9pm that night and enabled our duty technician to image 4 drives, solve the corruption caused by bad sectors and then copy the  recovered data back to a drive  for uploading from the clients UK data center, then restored on newly provisioned servers ready for business opening in Paris  8am the following Monday.

“This additional capacity ensures our corporate, larger organisation SME’s with business/production critical data is restored quickly, cost effectively  and enabled R3 to use this spare capacity when not needed for emergencies to offer budget services and staged payment terms for those who need our success rates but are willing to wait longer for their data.

Andy Butler has helped many thousands of business and consumers and acts as operations manager to the R3 data recovery engineers. He is passionate about data recovery and helps keep production on target out of hours and at weekends as well as offering free consultations 7 days per week.

R3 Data Recovery is retained as preferred supplier to Universities, Governmental departments, broadcasting and film production companies, legal firms, architects, car manufacturers, steel producers, banking and foreign exchange providers as well as to hundreds of small to medium businesses through IT Support companies throughout the UK recovering data from all kind of media types: from hard drives to memory sticks, servers, smart phones and VM’s / VHD’s.

R3 also help home users, students and the self employed – Give Andy and the team call on 0800 999 3282 or 0333 123 3282.

Filed Under: Data Recovery Tagged With: , , , , ,

RAID Data Recovery Process

05/05/2013 By

RAID Data Recovery Process

If your RAID has failed and time is critical  Call 0800 999 3282 or use the contact form. Emergency and priority services call 079 3282 4264, Data Recovery Hospital treats all RAID recoveries as extremely high priority, collection of your server or failed disks can be within 60 minutes of your call –  day or night 365 days of the year.

The first step is to establish whether or not the storage device needs to come to our market-leading laboratory facilities. If so, we will look to create an image of the accessible data onto new media, so that we can perform a logical analysis to understand the exact nature of the data loss problem.  We can repair, recover and restore data 7 days a week and routinely restore failed RAID arrays and servers within 24-48 hours if required.

If any files are inaccessible, our lab will exhaustively test each of the components to determine whether or not there has been any physical damage. Typical components that can cause mechanical failure include read / write heads, electronics, drive motors, head assemblies and magnets.

In the event that any of the components have failed, or been damaged, we will replace them in our ISO 3 clean room . We will then use specialist hardware and software to create a raw image of the data to be recovered.

If data has been lost due to a logical problem, our data recovery engineers will examine the low-level data sectors to establish the layout of volumes which are striped over more than one drive. They will also work out the fixes that are needed to the filesystem structures, to enable access to the missing data.

We will ‘de-stripe’ multiple drive servers to enable filesystems to be repaired, so that the lost data files can be restored. In the event that the filesystem structures are missing or damaged to the point of being useless, we will look to extract the data directly from the destriped image.

Over time, our data recovery programmers have built a suite of bespoke tools that allow our engineers to analyse, de-stripe, fix, and recover data from, raw images from pretty much any operating system.

When the data has been successfully recovered, we will provide a complete file list so that you are able to establish that we have been successful in restoring all lost files.

Filed Under: Data Recovery, HDD Failure, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
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