A pair that wore out together, a resync that ran backwards, an enclosure that failed with two perfectly fine disks locked inside: each of these situations is recoverable. We copy the halves apart and compare them, and your files come off whichever proves the stronger.
No RAID quote is guesswork. Free diagnostic first, followed by one written figure, from £500 + VAT by member count; on logical rebuilds, you only pay if we recover your data.
Mirrors give you a single guarantee: they will keep working when one disk dies. Everything listed here goes beyond that guarantee, which is how it all ends up on this bench.
Both halves were purchased at the same time, turned on the same day and operated identically ever since. Whatever caused the first to fail typically catches up with the second soon after, and "soon" can mean a matter of days.
In most two-bay NAS devices and mirrored external enclosures, the controller or bridge board is the first to fail, leaving two fully healthy disks stuck inside a dead casing until each is read out on its own.
If you fit the wrong disk, or let the unit decide which one is used, your empty or outdated disk gets copied onto the good one. The mirror then does its job and erases everything it should have preserved.
A pair that ran degraded for different stretches ends up holding two versions of events. When merged carelessly, they damage one another; when imaged separately, each can contribute information only it has.
Deletion, corruption, a bad patch, a ransomware attack: mirroring copies every write as soon as it occurs, so all of these land on both sides of the mirror at once and neither side escapes.
A failed NAS firmware update or a self-corrupted operating system can take down a box with two good disks inside. The path back involves copying each disk and raising the volume on a separate piece of hardware.
The two disks are treated as separate jobs from the beginning. Both are copied on a hardware imager, but first, if one disk has a physical failure, that disk goes to the head-swap bench. After copying, both copies are placed side by side for comparison: which holds more of your data, and which is holding the most up-to-date version of it? Whichever comes out ahead becomes the base, the second is used to fill in missing or outdated information, and neither disk is ever written to again.
RAID 1 addresses one issue, namely what happens if a disk fails while the volume keeps running. Everything else simply goes around it. A deletion or a bad update reaches both sides of the mirror at the same time; a ransomware attack eats its way through the two sides in one go; and a dead enclosure takes the pair out of service simultaneously. For this reason a failed mirror is a proper recovery job, and the old advice still applies: the backup that will save you is the one on different media, stored somewhere else.
Most pairs sent to us have come from a two-bay Synology, QNAP or Netgear device, or a small office server, from places such as Norwich, Diss, Wymondham and North Walsham. Once you have a quote, please send the two disks, labelled by bay, together in a single package to our Cambridge location, a straight run down the A11 or one working day in the post. RAID recovery and NAS recovery hold the wider picture, and the figures are on the data recovery cost page.
Both halves copied, the stronger one rebuilt; free diagnosis, and then a figure in writing.
Most items arrive at this bench by insured and tracked post. We recommend getting a quote first, either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic, and once you have received your quote, simply post the item. Post is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel sent from Norfolk typically arrives on the bench within a working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? Before sending, remove the hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), as we do not accept whole units. From a DVR or recorder, send just the disk. From a server or RAID, take out the disks and clearly label each disk by bay number. A network attached storage (NAS) device may be sent as its disks if they can be removed; otherwise please send the NAS itself. There is only one type of drive we are unable to accept: storage soldered onto a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, extremely thin laptops). In such cases, if the storage cannot be taken out it cannot be accepted. If you are unsure whether you have a removable drive or not, call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Please mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Norwich along the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Otherwise you can post it using a tracked service and we will receive it the following working day. We will contact you as soon as we have your drive and it is booked onto our bench.
If you're unsure of what to include in the box, please call us on 0800 689 0668 before sealing it. Or, for a first view on what we can do, you can use our free online diagnostic.