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 Cambridge 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.
The instinct after a failure is to get the system running again. In regulated financial work that instinct can cost you the ability to demonstrate what happened, which may matter more than the downtime.
Where records are subject to retention obligations, or where the incident may be reportable, the correct first step is to image before anything is repaired, reinstalled or rebuilt. That preserves the position without preventing the restore — the restore then runs from a verified copy rather than over the evidence.
It costs a few hours and it is not reversible if skipped.
If personal data may have been affected. UK GDPR requires notification to the ICO within 72 hours of becoming aware. That clock is independent of whether the data is recovered, and it starts now rather than when the recovery finishes.
Financial data gets the handling we apply to evidential work as standard: documented receipt, write-blocked acquisition where appropriate, hash verification, and a record of who held the media throughout. We do this without being asked because on this class of work somebody frequently asks later.
Everything stays in-house. Nothing is subcontracted, no data leaves the UK, and one named engineer handles the job from diagnostic to delivery. We are ICO registered and will sign your own confidentiality terms before the media arrives.
Array work from £500 +VAT. Power it down cleanly, change nothing, record the disk order and ring. Most of the damage we see on these was done in the first hour by somebody trying to bring the volume back up.
If personal data is affected, UK GDPR requires notification within 72 hours of becoming aware. That is a legal obligation independent of recovery, and worth acting on now rather than after.
A seasonal pattern here. Sage files have fixed structures that recover predictably once the underlying volume is readable. Tell us the deadline on the first call.
Yes. A written technical account of what failed, what was affected and what was recovered, with the custody record, comes as standard.
In-house, nothing subcontracted, no data leaving the UK, ICO registered, and your own NDA signed before the equipment arrives.
From £500 +VAT for arrays and servers, £300 +VAT for a single machine, fixed in writing after the free diagnostic.