Specialist work · urgent jobs
Firms across Birmingham and the West Midlands already know what a stoppage costs: the cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover in September 2025 held up production for about five weeks and reached more than five thousand other organisations. Priority here is a position in the order of work, nothing more. A parcel marked urgent is opened the day it lands, diagnosed that day, and imaged ahead of everything else for every hour the lab is open.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The server the whole company runs on has stopped | Every disk imaged, then the array rebuilt from copies — urgent by default | Start with 'business down' |
| A rebuild stopped half way and nobody has touched it since | Sensible — each further attempt eats into what is left | Keep it off and call us |
| A fixed date is riding on the files | Tender, hearing, payroll run — the bench works backwards from that date | State the date up front |
| The one copy of a lifetime's photographs has failed | A family archive gets the same urgency here as a company array | You will hear the truth either way |
| Filenames are changing in front of you | Containment first, then the evidence, then the data | Unplug the network lead; do not power it off |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
Two words will do it — business down — or the date you are working to. The job is marked urgent on that call, a case number raised, and bench time set aside before the parcel leaves you.
The parcel is opened and diagnosed the same day, then imaging runs without a break in front of every other job on the bench. Ring whenever you like and the engineer on it will tell you how far it has got.
Handover follows as soon as what came back matches the critical files you named at the start: an encrypted transfer, fresh media in the return post, or picked up at the lab.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
Five things decide a timescale: what has actually failed, how much capacity has to be read, the condition of the surfaces, whether a matching donor is on the shelf, and how much was attempted before the drive was posted. Not one of them cares how urgent the job is. That is why this page prints opening hours instead of an always-on badge. Urgent cases from Birmingham and the West Midlands run without interruption for the hours the lab keeps, Mon–Fri 9am–5:30pm, are diagnosed the day they arrive, and get a real date the moment there is one to give.
The complication here was a rebuild someone had already set running on the RAID beneath the booking system. Nothing was touched until each member drive had an image of its own. The array went back together virtually, off those images, and a checked database was carrying bookings again by Thursday lunchtime. Priority queue from the first call.
A mechanically sound disk with a logical fault is usually finished in one or two working days when it runs as a priority. Arrays and failing mechanics take longer. The imager sets that pace, and no amount of urgency makes a slow sector give up its contents any quicker. The honest figure comes after diagnosis, not before.
No. Be wary of any lab claiming that head swaps carry on unattended while everyone is at home. An urgent case here gets first place at the bench and unbroken work through every hour the lab is open, which is Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. A timetable you can check beats a badge on a website.
Not until the drive has been on the bench, and anyone doing it over the phone is guessing. A physical fault depends on the state of the platters and whether the right donor exists, neither of which can be judged down a telephone line. What is promised is the front of the queue, a diagnosis the day it lands, and a firm answer the hour one can be given.
There is a premium, because your drive pushes every other waiting job down the list. The amount is set out in the one written quote you receive, so you can decide with the number in front of you. Diagnosis is free whichever way you go.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.