Universities and research groups constitute a stable portion of the work on the benches at this location, and there is a distinct nature to that work: nearly none of it has commercial worth and nearly all of it cannot be replicated. The equipment consists primarily of departmental arrays (and supervisors' laptops), fieldwork drives and students' computers that were recovered in Cambridge by the same engineers who assessed them, that were kept confidential, and did not leave the country.
Our own engineers handle your research arrays, departmental servers and student drives within the United Kingdom, and return them to you on media that you retain.
This is not a sector that we have added. It is the single largest type of work coming to this bench due to its location.
Vision Park is three miles distant from the Science Park and a very short distance from Addenbrooke's, Granta Park and Babraham. The result is a continuous flow of work that most recovery labs see occasionally and that we see on a weekly basis: doctoral data on one external device with no backup, sequencing results on a lab drive owned by no-one, instrument PCs running data acquisition software that is older than the student using them.
The technical side of the job is often normal. What is not normal about the job is the damage caused if something goes wrong. For example: an employee losing a full day due to failure of their computer's hard drive in the workplace, as opposed to an academic researcher losing a whole degree when the drive holding 4 years of their fieldwork fails. And, unfortunately for the researcher, this is not something they can recover from with another copy: there simply isn't one available, as there has never been a back-up process that created one.
A single external drive, approximately 3-4 years old, containing the total output of an academic research degree. There were no automated cloud backups, and no central departmental backup processes in place. There was a deadline (submission) scheduled in the calendar.
Older microscopes, spectrometers, chromatography equipment, and test benches being run by older computers using software that cannot currently install onto new systems. In many cases, these computers have older connections such as IDE or very early SATA.
A laboratory network storage unit (NAS), purchased by a former postdoctoral fellow, which contains 10 years' worth of the group's data. Unfortunately, no one monitors the error messages generated by the NAS, and no one knows exactly what data exists on the NAS.
Departments, colleges and universities frequently have centralised automatic backup processes running on departmental/college computers without the user's knowledge. Simply sending an email to whoever manages these processes would resolve more issues than any technical effort we could make.
Tell us your submission date on that first call. If there is little time to go around, then the quickest full recovery is often not the correct route: generally, the correct route means getting the particular chapter(s), dataset(s) or figure(s) you need first and delivering those as soon as possible while we get the rest done.
This does not cost anything extra. The way to do this is by doing the jobs in a different sequence; this is what separates being able to meet deadlines from needing to apply for an extension. We can't possibly be prepared to do it if we don't know about the deadline until week two.
We are used to how universities purchase items. Invoicing to departments or with grant codes instead of directly to an individual, purchase orders generated before the project commences and quotations in formats acceptable to a university's financial offices are all standard rather than special requests.
If the data has never been published, confidentiality terms can be provided, and the work remains in-house. No sub-contracting takes place, no data leaves the UK and a single named engineer provides service from diagnostic through to delivery.
Call us, rather than email. Let us know when you plan to submit. Free diagnostic within 48 hours. When time is running low, we will provide you with the necessary chapter(s) first and complete the rest of the work afterwards.
Yes. We routinely process purchase orders, departmental invoices, and grant codes. Let us know about this at the diagnostic stage to enable us to supply all that your financial office needs.
All work is performed internally using our own engineers; nothing is sub-contracted, none of the data will leave the UK, and we will sign a non-disclosure agreement prior to the arrival of the media.
Let us know at the diagnostic stage if the equipment will have to be returned to service, and we can provide the recovery as a bootable clone on modern media instead of simply as a folder of files.
Yes, and there is no cost involved. Check with the person who manages the system to determine if it has been configured to be backed up via a central server. If it does use OneDrive or SharePoint then also review their version history. A significant percentage of recoveries end here.
Costs start at £300 plus VAT per single drive and £500 plus VAT for multi-disk configurations. Costs will be fixed in writing after completion of the complimentary 48-hour diagnostic phase.