Acomb, Fulford and Heslington · York
Data recovery, York. A city that runs on drawings and case files, usually one copy of each.
City of York Council is a unitary authority, not North Yorkshire, and the built-up area held 141,685 people at the 2021 census. A council report in July 2020 put the city at £5.2 billion and 9,000 businesses. A good many of them sell nothing but files. Aviva, Network Rail, a Northern crew depot, the University of York and its 22,345 students, Persimmon's head office, Fera Science and the labs on the Science Park. Then the solicitors, the architects working on listed fabric, and the archaeological units whose site records cannot be collected twice. The bench is in Leeds, west along the A64. Ring us first. Number every disk by its bay before it leaves the chassis, then post the lot. Looking at it costs nothing.
An engineer will take the details
0800 6890668
What arrives from York and the villages.
Nothing similar? Go to the triage →| What you see | Why it comes to us | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| A research group's server that cannot find its volume | One array, no spare, and a dataset nobody can gather again | Call it urgent at booking, number the bays, post the lot |
| A lab instrument's PC that stops before it posts | Methods and calibration sit on that machine and nowhere else | Pull the drive out; the instrument itself stays put |
| A NAS that dropped a disk months back | Nothing on the front of the box tells you an array is short | Shut it down before another goes |
| A laptop locked, and no note of the recovery key | BitLocker went on at setup and the 48 digits went nowhere | Track the key down, starting with the sign-in used |
| A share where every file has stopped opening | Ransomware, and the only backup was sitting on the same network | Off the network first. Then read the ransomware page. |
Getting it out of York in one piece.
Questions we get from York.
Is there somewhere in York to hand it in?
No. Everything is in one place, the intake lab in Leeds, so the parcel makes the journey instead of you. The A64 runs west from York to the ring road, dual carriageway all the way, with no bridge and no toll on it; trains are half-hourly if you would rather bring it over on a weekday. Most people post it, tracked and insured, and it is on the bench next morning.
The office has stopped. How quickly can you turn it round?
Tell us at the booking and the case is marked urgent on the spot: it is opened the day the box lands, imaged straight through, and you get a timescale you can hold us to once the diagnosis is far enough on. The phone is answered 9am to 5:30pm, Monday to Friday. The emergency page sets out what really governs the pace of a rushed job.
Should the RAID controller come with the disks?
No, leave it in the machine. The array goes back together in software, off sector images of the member disks, so the controller stays where it is. Take the drives out bare, write the bay number on each, include the one that failed first, and start no rebuild.
What should a York firm do first?
Ring before anything is unplugged. Five minutes on the phone usually establishes which part has failed and what else is piled on top, and everything else follows from that: which disks leave the chassis, how each is labelled, which carrier to book. Nothing gets packed before that call.
What people read after this.
It leaves York as a parcel and comes back as files.
Leave it switched off. Tell us what happened. Nothing gets agreed before the free diagnosis has said what it is.