Type 'IT disaster recovery Swindon' into a search box and two unrelated trades answer. The first is continuity: consultants and providers who design failover, replicate servers, script restore runbooks and rehearse the worst week of your company's life before it happens. The second is salvage: an engineering lab that takes one specific dead device — the server disk with no heartbeat, the NAS volume that won't mount, the array that shed two members — and brings the files off it. IT disaster recovery is the rehearsal; data recovery is what happens when the understudy doesn't know the lines either.
We're the second trade, and we'd rather say so plainly than sell you a confusion. No continuity retainers, no standby infrastructure, no consultancy days — just the bench your failed storage ends up on, sent by you or by your IT company, when hardware quits. The two trades depend on each other: a rehearsed IT disaster recovery plan is why most firms never meet us, and we're the fallback for the day the plan meets reality and loses.
The incidents that reach us from Swindon's business parks — Cheney Manor, Dorcan, Kembrey Park, South Marston, the offices along the A419 and around the M4 junctions — are rarely cinematic. A RAID 5 quietly loses one disk in spring and a second during the August rebuild. The NAS behind a shared drive takes a power cut badly. Ransomware lands on a file server the same week somebody discovers the backup job has been red since March. Every such incident asks two questions at once: 'how does the firm trade tomorrow?', which is an IT disaster recovery question, and 'who gets the data off this hardware?', which is ours.
On the second question the process is built for speed where speed matters. Flag a case as business-critical and it's prioritised from arrival; couriers collect from Swindon and the towns around it; and your IT provider stays in the loop throughout — they rebuild on fresh kit while we extract from the old. The hardware-specific detail lives on NAS recovery, RAID recovery and SAN recovery.
Most of the disasters in our intake log were cancellable in advance by four habits. Keep three copies of anything vital, on two kinds of storage, one of them away from the building — the classic 3-2-1 shape. Prove a restore actually works once a quarter, because a backup nobody has restored from is a rumour, not a system. Repeat in every IT induction that RAID buys uptime through one drive failure and protects against nothing else — not deletion, not encryption, not fire, not a rebuild that goes sideways. And put the plan on paper — asset list, storage map, phone numbers — because institutional memory takes annual leave.
Those four habits are the cheapest IT disaster recovery Swindon money can buy, and it costs us work every time we say so.
Stop the machinery before the heroics start: power the affected storage down, veto rebuild attempts and repair utilities, and mark every removed drive with its slot number. Then ring 0800 689 0668 and use the phrase 'business-critical'. Collection gets arranged, the diagnostic is prioritised and finished inside 2 working days of the drives arriving, and a single fixed quote lands before any work is authorised.
If it can hold until tomorrow, the free online diagnostic is the fastest way to put the details in front of an engineer — we'll ring you back to talk it through.
Write this over the server rack: an array is not an archive. RAID exists so one dead drive doesn't stop the business today. It preserves nothing against deletion, ransomware, fire or a failed rebuild tomorrow.
The diagnostic is free, the quote is fixed, and logical faults run no fix no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.