Urgent jobs · first onto the imager
Urgent here means something you can check for yourself. The day your parcel reaches us it is opened, the fault has a name before that day ends, and your drive meets the imager in front of every other job queued for it. Published bands do not move for urgency. A single drive stays at £300 + VAT; arrays, NAS boxes and servers stay at from £500 + VAT; and where a priority charge applies, it is written separately onto the one quote you agree. A Worksop distributor whose business runs off a single server in the warehouse office, an edit suite in Nottingham with a card that will not mount, a Derby practice with Friday's payroll to get out — all three do better to ring before they post.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
0115 8220606
| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| The server the whole firm depends on has stopped | Each disk cloned before anything else, then the array rebuilt off those clones — a priority job every time | Ring us before you post it |
| A rebuild stopped halfway, and it has been left alone since | Good instinct — each retry from here spends more of what survives | Leave it powered down and call |
| There is a fixed date at the far end of this | Payroll, a tribunal, a despatch date: give us yours and the bench plans back from it | Tell us the deadline up front |
| It held the only copies of the family photographs | A household archive gets scheduled exactly the way a company server does | Either way, you hear it straight |
| Filenames altering in front of you | Contain it, preserve what remains, then recover | Pull the network lead out and leave the power alone |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
One sentence is enough: the business has stopped, or here is the date I have to hit. Bench time is set aside on that call, a case number opened, and the job flagged urgent, all while the parcel is still in your hands.
On the day it reaches us, the box is opened and the fault named. Cloning then runs through in one unbroken pass, in front of everything queued behind. Ring whenever you want; the person holding your job will say where it has got to.
Your data goes out the moment the files you nominated as the priority open and read correctly: either by encrypted transfer, or on fresh media that we buy in and post back to you, carriage at our own cost.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
Five things set the timescale, and none of them moves because urgency has been paid for: which component gave out; the number of terabytes to be got through; how the surfaces are holding up; whether the right donor already sits on our shelf; and how much had been attempted before the parcel got taped shut. That is why opening hours are printed on this page instead of a badge suggesting somebody is at the bench overnight. Monday to Friday, 9am until 5:30pm. Parcels marked priority — from Nottingham, from Derby, from Leicester, from the towns in between — are opened on arrival, worked through every staffed hour without a pause, and given a completion date as soon as one can be stood behind.
The call came in on the Monday with a rebuild still running, so we brought the job forward. First instruction: cut the power, and ask nothing more of the array. Each member then went onto an image of its own, and the reassembly was done from that set, never from the disks themselves. The database opened without error, and the firm was taking bookings again by the Thursday.
The fault decides it. Where the problem is purely logical and the mechanics are sound, priority work is often finished within a day or two. An array takes longer, and so does a drive with heads on the way out. After that the imager governs everything: worn sectors give up what they hold at their own speed, and paying more will not hurry a single one of them. The engineer's assessment comes first and an honest date comes after. Never the other way about.
No — and any firm hinting that head swaps go on unattended after its building empties is one to look at twice. Priority buys exactly one thing on this bench: the top of the list for your job, and unbroken work on it during every hour the bench is staffed. Those hours are Monday to Friday, 9am until 5:30pm. Published hours you can ring up and test are worth more than a badge nobody can.
No. Sight unseen, a date is a guess wearing a suit. Where the fault is physical, the answer depends on what the surfaces do under the imager and on whether a donor of the right model and generation can be found at all — neither of them a telephone question. Three things are promised instead: top of the list, an assessment done on the day the parcel reaches us, and a date the moment there is an honest one to give.
Yes. Putting your drive in front of everybody else's carries a cost, written onto the one quote you agree, next to the recovery figure itself. Free diagnosis whichever way you choose, and where nothing is recovered most jobs carry no fee.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.