Accountants/brokers/finance professionals generally experience the same two pressures simultaneously – an immovable filing/reporting deadline, and confidential client money information. Both of these are managed from Manchester by our in-house team of engineers — returned as usable ledgers/practice databases, i.e. usable in the way your system expects them to be; not as a collection of files extracted from the original.
Practice systems / accounting databases / finance servers — recovered in-house under NDA; verified for compatibility with your required reading application(s); stored entirely within the UK.
Deadlines typically dictate how we handle all of our projects. Therefore, if your submission deadline is set then we will image the applicable ledger/database(s) first and return them prior to completing the remainder of the project — and if there is truly no possible way to meet the deadline, then we will inform you well ahead of when you would need to take action based on this new timeline.
Based upon our experience as opposed to being listed as supported formats.
The practice server, mid year-end. A redundant array lost a disk many months ago; as soon as the second disk fails in an inconvenient time frame, the redundancy is found to be broken. The cost for recovering an array starts from £500 + VAT, and we will image your ledger(s) first so that you may continue working while the remainder of the array recovery completes.
The bookkeeper’s machine. There was only one machine holding the current copy of something. Unfortunately, the synchronisation process ceased to function in March and nobody noticed. Therefore, there was no backup. The cost of recovering all the data was inexpensive. The cost of losing access to the information was very high.
An encrypted laptop nobody can open. Departing employees' machines are often full of data that will need to be recovered. In some cases, updates may cause their machine to drop into BitLocker recovery mode. If the key has not been lost then the data can be recovered. In many cases, however, the keys are held by IT staff rather than genuinely lost.
Ransomware on a Friday afternoon. Not decryptable, but often recoverable around it: (a) if the ransomware run did not remove all of the shadow copy data; (b) if there are still unencrypted versions of files present in free space; (c) if the encryption had been unable to find or access the authentication information required to access a particular file, then the file is likely to remain accessible via other means.
Financial records are different from typical business records because they create obligations.
After a disaster event, one common mistake companies make is to immediately go back into production by recovering data from backups. Where financial records are involved, this can be the wrong thing to do. Auditors, insurers, and even regulatory bodies (such as the Financial Conduct Authority), may require a view of the systems as they were at the time of the disaster. If you recover over the top of the original system, you lose that view.
Imaging the failed storage as read-only immediately preserves the position at zero additional cost & does not impede the restore in any way. It will always be possible to restore later; it will never be possible to "un-restore". If the failure may also constitute a personal data breach (e.g. client records, payroll or any other type of record containing individual details), imaging the failed storage allows for an informed review of potential breaches vs. a guess made after the evidence has gone.
Worth mentioning during the initial call rather than once you accept the price quote.
The pace of finance is generally governed by external hard-stop dates like the filing due date at Companies House, a quarterly VAT filing, or year-end audit dates. If a system fails three weeks before these deadlines, it is an inconvenience. The same failure three days prior to these deadlines is going to generate a completely different conversation.
We will work to your specified deadline as far as physically possible. We can provide priority service which moves you to the top of our processing queues and allows us to access the ledgers, client files or mailboxes you need first. This means that you can receive those quicker, while we complete the remainder of the image overnight.
However, we should clearly state that we will never mislead you into thinking that providing additional funds reduces the delivery time for a donor part, or lets a deteriorating drive be read faster than it would have been able to tolerate. When a deadline cannot be met, we would much rather inform you immediately when we make the initial contact, allowing you sufficient time to adjust your plans.
Yes. In cases where the original storage device has failed we will reconstruct the image first, followed by a check to ensure that the data files are structurally consistent prior to extracting them from the image — a file may be fully populated with bytes but still unable to be opened if it was captured during the process of being written.
No, not before the affected system is imaged. Auditors, insurers and regulators may need to be able to view the state of the system as it was, therefore restoring over the original cannot be done. The cost to image is zero, and there are no delays.
Yes. NDAs are signed as standard; all work goes through one named contact; data is always stored in the UK; data is never subcontracted; it is returned on fresh media; copies are destroyed after a retention period of your choice.
Yes, please let us know at the start. A priority service allows for the job to move forward and allows us to image the specific ledgers or client files you require first. We deliver these files whilst completing the remaining processes.
Yes, with the recovery key; the drive is first copied off as read only and then the volume is opened from that image instead of opening it from the failing hardware. Without the recovery key we can try to recover a password in some cases when it was weak or you remember part of your password but will never succeed if your password is strong and randomly generated.
For servers, RAID & NAS recovery the prices are from £500 + VAT and for a single drive recovery prices start at £300 + VAT. The free 48-hour diagnosis will provide you with a fixed price quote prior to us doing any work, with no payment required for most jobs if they fail.
The free diagnosis will be followed by a written quote and all our work is done under NDA, in house and kept within the UK.