Data backup and disaster recovery get sold as one service and they are two. Backup is a copy, made on a schedule, kept somewhere the original cannot take it down with it. Disaster recovery is the plan wrapped around that copy: what comes back first, who decides, how long the firm can trade without each system, and whether anybody has actually tested a restore this year. One is a file. The other is a decision taken in advance so that nobody has to take it at four o'clock on a bad afternoon.
Be clear about where this page comes from. We are a recovery lab. We do not sell backup software, monitoring or a managed continuity contract, and nothing here is a pitch for one, because that work belongs to an IT provider who knows your systems. What this bench has is the other half of the picture: the disks that arrive after the plan has failed, and a fairly reliable sense of which failures were preventable and which were not. Read it as advice from the place your backup ends up when it turns out not to work.
The pattern here has a local shape. Freight forwarders, hauliers and agents around the port run manifests, customs paperwork and proof of delivery on systems that were specified years ago and became load-bearing without anybody deciding they should. Manufacturers at Speke and Halewood, and the process plants around Runcorn and Widnes, keep production, calibration and compliance records on line PCs in rooms nobody visits, and on camera recorders quietly logging a process that an auditor will eventually ask about. A failure there is a regulatory problem before it is a commercial one, and the deadline belongs to somebody else.
At the other end of the city the studios in the Baltic Triangle work the way small creative firms always have: project archives on external drives, a NAS in a cupboard bought on one invoice with four identical disks, and a workstation holding the only copy of something a client has already paid for. Solicitors, accountants and surveyors in the commercial district tend to have the opposite problem, which is decent live systems and an old case archive nobody has ever migrated. Hotels and restaurants in the city centre and along the front at Southport lose booking and till records to a failed back-office machine and find out afterwards that the backup stopped running in the spring. The University of Liverpool, LJMU and Hope produce a steady supply of research data that sits in a single location far longer than anybody would admit to: an external drive in a postdoc's bag, an instrument PC quietly writing to a local capture folder, a laptop that travels home every night.
None of that is carelessness. It is simply what happens when whoever makes the data is also the person looking after it and has a deadline of their own. The failures are ordinary too: external drives that got dropped, laptop disks that died, a server disk that had been logging errors nobody ever read, and a NAS that ran quite happily for six years on four disks bought together and then lost two of them in a fortnight.
First, hold one copy that is plugged into nothing. Not a second drive under the same desk, not another share on the same network, and not a sync folder that copies a deletion across within seconds of it happening. Offline or properly off site, rotated on a schedule, and thoroughly dull. Second, prove a restore works. A backup nobody has ever restored from is a hope rather than a backup, and the morning it fails is a poor moment to find that out. Pull something real back once a quarter and time it, because that figure is your true downtime whatever the plan on paper claims.
Third, put in writing what has to be back first, in what order, who signs it off and who needs telling. A good half of what an incident costs is people standing round waiting to be given permission. Fourth, and this is the one that saves the data rather than the timetable: take your hands off failing hardware. A clicking drive, a NAS stuck partway through a rebuild it will never finish, a server that reboots every few minutes — each further attempt to coax them along cuts what an engineer can get back. Write this one on the wall if it helps: an array is not an archive. RAID is there so a single dead disk does not halt trading this afternoon, and that is the whole of its job. It will not save you from a deletion, an encryption run, a burst pipe or a rebuild that goes wrong.
Shut the affected system down instead of letting it grind away, and do not start a rebuild or allow one to continue. Mark each disk with the bay it came out of before a single one moves, because that map is worth real money later and it disappears the moment somebody tidies the set into a box. Ring 0800 689 0668, Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5:30pm, and say plainly what the failure has stopped. The job gets flagged on that call, so it reaches an engineer as it arrives rather than sitting in a queue.
Then send the storage rather than the furniture. Tracked, insured post reaches the lab at Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester the next working day from anywhere in Merseyside, about 35 miles along the M62. There is no collection service anywhere in this network, so no part of your recovery depends on a van turning up. Each disk is imaged on its own before a single thing is reconstructed, so no part of the job ever rides on a live rebuild. The diagnostic is free and finished within 2 working days of arrival, the fixed written figure comes before any chargeable work begins — arrays, NAS boxes and servers from £500 + VAT — and a completed recovery is normally 2-4 working days. We are happy to work alongside your own IT people, and the job generally goes better when we do.
An array is not an archive. RAID buys you one thing: a dead disk does not stop you trading this afternoon. It does nothing at all about a deletion, an encryption run, a burst pipe or tomorrow's rebuild going sideways. The only thing covering those is a copy sitting somewhere the system cannot reach.
Free diagnostic within 2 working days of arrival, one fixed written quote, no fix no fee on logical faults. Cards £250 + VAT, any one drive or SSD £300 + VAT.