Firms searching for disaster recovery in Aberdeen are looking for one of two things and it is worth knowing which. The first is planning: tested backups, a copy held away from the building, documented failover, and a written answer to the question of what happens on the morning the server will not start. That is your IT provider's work, it is bought in advance, and it is the cheaper of the two by a wide margin. The second is salvage: the array is down, the restore has failed or never truly existed, and the files must be lifted off the hardware directly. That is a bench, and it is what happens here.
The two get confused because the same phrase sells both, and the confusion costs money. A firm that buys a continuity retainer and never tests a restore has bought the paperwork without the outcome. A firm that has a genuinely tested backup rarely needs a recovery lab at all. The useful question is not who to phone but which situation you are actually in, and the answer usually arrives at about three in the afternoon.
The work coming into this bench from Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire has a shape to it. Engineering and subsea firms out at Westhill and Dyce, where project data, survey sets, CAD models and tender packs live on a single portable drive because the file was too large for the server share. Offshore supply-chain businesses whose site laptops and ruggedised externals have been round a boat and a helicopter more times than the manufacturer intended, and where salt and vibration produce mechanical failure months before anyone hears a noise. Fish and food processing at Peterhead and Fraserburgh, where the till, the grading system and the traceability records are all on kit nobody thought of as IT until it stopped.
Then the failures themselves, in the order we see them. A single disk in a RAID that has been degraded for weeks and nobody read the email, followed by a second disk going. A NAS that dropped a volume and was rebuilt straight away, which is the fastest way to turn a whole recovery into a partial one. A backup that has been failing silently since a password change in the spring. Ransomware arriving through a remote-access port that was opened for a contractor and never shut. And, more often than any of them, a laptop that was the only copy — because a person, not a policy, decided where the file lived.
Test a restore, not a backup. A backup job reporting success is a claim. A file pulled back from it and opened is evidence. Do it quarterly, pick a real file, and get somebody who is not the person who set it up to try.
Keep one copy disconnected. Anything permanently mounted, mapped or synced is reachable by ransomware and by an accidental deletion alike. One offline or immutable copy is worth more than three online ones.
Know what RAID actually buys you. An array keeps you trading when a single disk dies. Nothing beyond that. Deleted files, encrypted files, a flood, a fire, a rebuild attempted in a panic — none of them are covered. Treat the array as uptime insurance and keep the archive somewhere else entirely.
Write down who to ring, before you need to. Ten minutes now saves an afternoon of guessing later. Include the instruction that matters most: power it down and do not rebuild.
Stop. Power the affected kit down and leave it down. Do not rebuild the array, do not resilver, do not reinstall over the top and do not let the NAS start rebuilding itself while you decide. Every one of those writes across the material a recovery works from. Ring 0800 689 0668 and the job gets flagged before your parcel arrives.
Send the disks, not the chassis. Label each with the bay it came from and post them together, tracked and insured, or use a courier your firm books and pays for, or bring them to the counter at Edinburgh Data Recovery, 4 Redheughs Rigg, Westpoint, South Gyle, Edinburgh EH12 9DQ, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — about two and a half hours down the A90. Nothing is picked up from your premises. Every disk is imaged read-only and the array is reconstructed from the images rather than from your hardware. The diagnostic is free and finished within 2 working days of arrival, and you get one fixed written figure covering the whole set. Logical faults run no fix, no fee; mechanical, electrical, water and fire work takes half up front with the balance on a result; ransomware, CCTV and BitLocker are forensic-classed and settled in advance.
A RAID array is not a backup. It exists so that losing one disk does not halt trading before teatime, and that is the entire extent of what it does. Deletions, encryption runs, burst pipes, fires and botched rebuilds all go straight through it. The firms that learn this expensively are nearly always the ones whose backup job had been reporting success every night for months.
Diagnosis costs nothing and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure is fixed in writing, and logical work runs no fix no fee. Begin online, or lift the phone.