Accounting practices, brokers and finance teams tend to arrive with the same two pressures at once: a filing or reporting date that will not move, and client money data that has to stay confidential while it is dealt with. Both are handled from Manchester by our own engineers — ledgers and practice databases returned in a state the software will open, not as a folder of extracted files.
Practice systems, accounting databases and finance servers — recovered in-house under NDA, checked against the software that has to read them, and kept within the UK.
Deadlines shape the order of work here more than the technical difficulty does. Where a submission date is fixed we image the ledger and its databases first and return those while the rest completes behind them — and where the date genuinely is not achievable, we will say so while you still have time to act on it.
Drawn from the work rather than from a list of supported formats.
The practice server, mid year-end. An array that lost a disk months ago behind working redundancy, discovered when the second one goes at the worst possible moment. Array work from £500 +VAT, with the ledgers imaged first so you can carry on while the rest completes.
The bookkeeper’s machine. One PC holding the only current copy of something, because the sync stopped working in March and nobody noticed. Cheap to recover and expensive to be without.
An encrypted laptop nobody can open. A departing employee’s machine, or one that dropped into BitLocker recovery after an update. Recoverable with the key — and the key is usually held by IT rather than genuinely lost.
Ransomware on a Friday afternoon. Not decryptable, but frequently recoverable around: shadow copies the run failed to clear, unencrypted originals still in free space, and anything on a system it could not authenticate to.
Because financial records carry obligations that ordinary business data does not.
The instinct after a failure is to restore from backup and carry on. Where financial records are involved that can be the wrong first move: auditors, insurers and in some cases the FCA may need to see the state of the system as it was, and restoring over the original destroys exactly that.
Imaging the affected storage read-only before anything else preserves the position at no extra cost and with no delay to the restore itself. You can always restore afterwards; you cannot un-restore. Where a failure may also constitute a personal data breach — client records, payroll, anything with individuals in it — the same image is what allows a considered assessment rather than a guess made after the evidence has gone.
Worth raising on the first call rather than after the quote.
Finance work carries fixed external deadlines in a way most sectors do not — a Companies House filing, a VAT quarter, a year-end that cannot move because the auditors are booked. A failure three weeks out is an inconvenience; the same failure three days out is a different conversation entirely.
Tell us the date and we will work to it where the physics allow. Priority handling puts you at the front of the queue and lets us pull the specific ledgers, client files or mailboxes you need first, so those can be back with you while the remainder of the image completes overnight.
What we will not do is imply that paying more shortens a donor part’s delivery or lets a deteriorating drive be read faster than it tolerates. Where the deadline is not achievable we would rather say so on the first call, while you still have time to plan around it.
Free diagnostic, written quote, and everything under NDA, in-house, and kept on UK soil.