A pair that wore out in step, a resync that ran backwards, an enclosure that died with two good disks locked inside it. Every one of those is a recoverable position. The halves are copied apart, weighed against one another, and your files come off whichever proves the stronger.
No RAID quote is guesswork. Free diagnostic first, then one written figure — from £500 + VAT by member count, logical rebuilds under no fix, no fee.
A mirror gives you one guarantee and no more: it will survive one dead disk. Everything listed here steps straight over that guarantee, which is how it all ends up on this bench.
Both halves were bought together, switched on the same morning and worked identically ever since. Whatever accounted for the first is generally close behind the second, and close behind can mean a matter of days.
In two-bay NAS units and mirrored external cases the controller or bridge board is usually first to go, which leaves two entirely healthy disks locked inside a dead shell until each is read out on its own.
Fit the wrong member, or let the unit decide for you, and the empty or out-of-date disk gets copied across the good one. The mirror then does its job beautifully and erases exactly what it was bought to keep.
A pair that spent different stretches running degraded ends up holding different versions of events. Merged carelessly they spoil one another; imaged apart, each is free to contribute what only it has.
Deleting, corrupting, a bad patch, ransomware — mirroring exists to copy writes the instant they happen, so all of that arrives on both halves together and neither one is spared.
A NAS firmware update that fails, or an operating system that corrupts itself, can leave the box dead around a pair of good disks. The route in is copying each one and raising the volume on different hardware.
The two disks are handled as separate jobs from the outset. Each is copied on a hardware imager, with any physically failed half going to the clean bench beforehand, and the two copies are then set side by side and compared: which holds more of your data, and which holds the newer version of it. Whichever comes out stronger becomes the base, the other contributes to fill the gaps, and the disks themselves are never written to again.
RAID 1 answers one question, which is what happens when a drive dies while the volume keeps running. Everything else walks past it unchallenged. A deletion or a poisonous update reaches both halves in the same instant; ransomware chews through the pair in one pass; a dead enclosure removes them both from service at once. That is why a failed mirror is a proper recovery job, and why the old advice still holds: the backup that saves you is the one on other media, kept somewhere else.
Most pairs that arrive here have come out of a two-bay Synology, QNAP or Netgear box, or a small office server, posted from Norwich, Diss, Wymondham and North Walsham. Send both disks in the same parcel 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 of what reaches this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel posted in Norfolk is usually on the bench the next working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? The hard drive or SSD needs to come out first, and only the bare drive travels — taking drives out of machines is not something we do here. Storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, one or two very thin laptops) is the single thing beyond us: if it will not come out, it cannot come in.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. From Norwich it is about an hour and twenty down the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 — or next working day by tracked post. You hear from us as soon as it is booked onto the bench.
Unsure what to put in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or run the free online diagnostic.