New Year, New Challenges for 2016

 
A busy end of 2015 and an even busier start to 2016 – with floods and storm generated work exceeding the same period for 2014/15.

All made possible after significant investment and changes in the second half of 2015 to our hard drive repair and rework capacity.

The Security House lab has exceeded the previous years December total with 116 more completed cases, however this was still over 50 cases below target because of the increased complexity of cases affected by flood contamination. This included a 6 x 6TB drive server in RAID 6 which had been submerged in flood water and inadvertently restarted after drying out causing further complications.

It was a good decision to expand the labs spare capacity and take on additional offices for admin and customer services releasing space in the Security House lab for more engineers and assistant technicians.

Several RAIDs and servers with 3- 10 drives has meant that most of the 300 imaging drives are currently being utilised ranging from 1TB to 6TB the image drives are key to the recovery process.

As well as increasing the labs production capacity with the addition of 12 more recovery systems at the time was ambitious and effectively makes R3 one of the largest data recovery labs in Europe with 60 recovery channels and another 16 planned for March 2016.

R3 is built around efficient utilisation of resources and engineers to keep success rates high and costs down through economies of scale.

With the purchase of a fourth competitor in less than 3 years, R3 data recovery have ensured they were able to bring additional production capacity with minimal detrimental effect to existing cases. The benefit of adding more capacity and another 2000 rare donor drives to our current 6000 catalogued donor drives was also beneficial to many clients.

The Security House lab is to be further refined during January and February to ensure it can meet the increasing demands of its class leading success rates.

Additional recruitment is also underway to complete the changes. R3 is not only one of the very best data recovery teams ever assembled in the UK, R3 also recovers drives declared unrecoverable by other labs.

After a Fire damaged SD card was rescued from an airplane crash, forensic investigators turned to Andy and the team, successfully recovered by R3 data recovery engineer Mike for a government agency, the project secured more work including an R&D project to be commenced in January.

A failed Macbook SSD required carefully controlled imaging to effect an emergency recovery for a student from Australia over the Christmas week, the client drove over 150 miles to Sheffield to bring the Macbook in for recovery after calling several labs for assistance.

A Failed hard drive rescued from New Years Day fire in Leicester was recovered overnight by R3 data recovery engineers. The R3 data recovery team and support staff have worked throughout Christmas and New Year to complete over 30 emergency recoveries with 20 more still in progress requiring extensive rework and engineer attention.

Most service levels delivery resumes from Monday 4th Jan
Some services and turnaround times will be affected by the influx of flood damaged drives but R3 are working shift patterns to maximise production from the first week of the New Year.

Dedicated drivers with sealable bags and tubs can come direct to collect drives which are contaminated.
R3 also manage disaster recovery, retrieving data from damaged or contaminated HDD, SSD, Computers, Laptops, Servers and mobile phones. We recover the data and can provide additional help, including sourcing replacement hardware, restoring data including software licences and settings.

R3 have a dedicated decontamination room separate from the lab and clean room.

Decontamination and cleaning of drives is necessary to prevent risk to our engineers and maximise chance of successful recovery. Preparing drives which have been submerged in flood waters is an additional process to be considered in the time needed, if sending in or preparing for collection it is important to mark any device packaging with the word “biohazard” – flood waters contain effluent and other contaminants which can be harmful.

Our dedicated drivers have been driving into London, York, Lancaster and Keswick to collect drives requiring recovery.