South-west Wales · Swansea
Data recovery, Swansea. Eighty miles of M4 to the bench; the parcel does the driving.
Swansea is the second most populous local authority in Wales, 238,490 people at the 2021 Census, and it makes data at that scale: the DVLA in its sixteen-storey block at Clase, twenty thousand-odd students at Swansea University, Morriston's 750 beds and the burns centre inside it, Amazon's distribution centre on Fabian Way, Vale's nickel refinery up at Clydach. It is also the furthest place on our list from the bench, about eighty miles east on the M4. That changes nothing except the postage. Phone us before a thing is unplugged, write the bay number on every disk, and send the whole set. The first look is free.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
0800 6890668
What arrives from the SA postcodes.
Not listed here? Try the triage →| What shows up | Why it lands here | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| A departmental server that lost its volume | One array, no spare disk, and years of research on it | Say it is urgent, label every bay, send them all |
| An instrument PC in a lab that will not post | The method files and calibration live on that machine alone | Take the drive out; leave the instrument be |
| A NAS that lost a disk months ago | A degraded array looks no different from a healthy one | Power it off before the next one |
| A laptop locked and the recovery key nowhere | BitLocker was switched on years back and never written down | Find the key, or the account it was saved to |
| A whole share of files that will not open any more | Businesses of this size are precisely what the gangs go hunting for | Unplug it from the network first; see the ransomware page |
Before the parcel leaves Swansea.
Questions from the SA postcodes.
Is there a branch in Swansea?
No, and that is deliberate. One properly equipped lab beats a counter in every town, and it is the parcel that travels rather than you. Fabian Way puts you on the M4 at J42, J47 covers Penllergaer and the west, and the overnight carriers all cover the SA postcodes. Post it on a weekday and it is usually on the bench the following morning.
Everything has stopped. How fast can you actually move?
Say so when you book and the case is flagged there and then: opened the day the box arrives, imaged without a pause, and you get a timescale you can rely on once the diagnosis is far enough along. We are here weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and what actually governs the speed of an urgent job is set out on the emergency page.
Do you want the RAID card the array ran on?
No. The set is reassembled in software from sector images of each member disk, so the card itself stays put. Take the drives out bare, number them by bay, put in the one that failed first, and never let the controller start a rebuild.
What is the first move for a Swansea firm?
Ring us before a cable moves. Five minutes on the phone usually settles what has actually failed and what is stacked on top of it, and the rest follows from that: which disks come out of the chassis, how they get labelled, which carrier to book. Do not pack anything before that call.
Pages people often read next.
From Swansea, it travels by post.
Do not switch it back on. Tell us what happened, and wait for the free diagnosis before agreeing to anything.