Sent in from · Slough
Data recovery, Slough. A gigawatt of data centres. Your files on one disk.
Slough is the densest and most industrial of the towns we cover: a trading estate that opened in 1920 and now runs to 474 acres, laboratories along the Bath Road, and the largest concentration of data centres in Europe drawing something close to a gigawatt between them. None of that helps when the one machine in the back office stops. Ring us before anything is unplugged, mark every disk with its bay number, and put the lot in the post; nothing is charged for the diagnosis.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
What breaks on the trading estate.
None of these? Run the triage →| The symptom | Why it turns up here | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A warehouse server that stopped seeing its array | Estate units run a single array and keep no spare | Marked urgent; label the bays and send the lot |
| A USB stick sheared off in the socket | Sticks carry paperwork between office, yard and cab all day | Bag every fragment, the broken end too |
| A four-bay NAS that lost a member in spring | A degraded array serves files as though nothing happened | Power it off before the second fails |
| An encrypted work laptop with no key to hand | IT switched BitLocker on, and nobody ever wrote the key down | The key, or the account holding it, first |
| A weekend that renamed every file on the share | Firms of exactly this size are what attackers go looking for | Disconnect it first; the ransomware page covers the rest |
A Slough job from call to copy.
Slough's usual questions.
Do you have a Slough office?
No, and the absence is deliberate. One properly equipped lab does more for a failed drive than a row of shopfronts, and a town this well served by couriers loses nothing by posting: a parcel handed over in the morning reaches the bench the next working day, and same-day courier is an option when trading stops.
Everything has stopped. How fast can you really be?
Tell us the company is at a standstill and the job moves up the list: opened the day the parcel lands, imaged during working hours, and given an honest timescale once the diagnosis will carry one. Hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm; the emergency page explains what sets the pace.
Do you need the original controller to rebuild an array?
No. Arrays are reconstructed from images of the member disks, so the original controller is never needed. Mark each disk with its bay, send every one including the dead member, and leave rebuild alone.
What should a Slough business do first?
Call before anything is unplugged. A few minutes on the phone settles what has failed and what depends on it, and that decides the rest: which disks come out, how each is marked, which courier to book. Nothing should be packed before that call.
Other work that comes in from Slough.
Next door to Slough, on the same terms
From Slough, a courier beats the M4.
Nothing is decided until the free diagnosis is in: leave the device off, and tell us what happened to it.