There are two kinds of data recovery. There's the hardware kind — a clean room, a failed disk, a forensics specialist physically pulling bits off a damaged platter. That's not us. Then there's the kind that hits most modern UK businesses: databases with rows that shouldn't have been deleted, migrations that went sideways, SaaS exports that lost half the relationships, backups that turn out to have been broken for months. That kind of data recovery is software work, and it's what we do.
We're a senior UK engineering team based in Bolton. When clients come to us for data recovery, they're usually somewhere on a spectrum from "this is annoying" to "we cannot operate tomorrow morning if this isn't fixed". Our first job is to stop the situation getting worse, and our second is to give you a clear, honest picture of what's recoverable and what isn't — before you commit to a recovery budget.
Data recovery scenarios we handle
Database recovery
Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB and the application data that sits on top of them. Accidentally dropped tables, deletes that were supposed to be filtered, transactions rolled forward when they should have been rolled back, replication that silently diverged. We use point-in-time recovery, transaction log replay, and where necessary, painstaking row-by-row reconstruction from logs and snapshots.
Broken migrations
One of the most common reasons businesses call us. A migration to a new platform that looked fine on day one turns out, weeks later, to have lost custom fields, dropped historical records, or merged two customers into one. We rebuild the bridge between the old system and the new — often by going back to the original export and rerunning it correctly — and reconcile the result with the live data.
Corrupt and broken backups
Backups are only as good as the last time someone tested a restore. We're regularly handed backups that "should" work and don't — wrong format, partial dumps, encryption keys nobody can find, files that error halfway through. Where the backup is partially recoverable, we'll get out everything that's there and reconstruct the rest from the most reliable adjacent sources.
Salvaging data from legacy or failed systems
An old system the supplier no longer supports, a SaaS account that's been suspended, a database server that won't boot. We extract the data using whatever path is still open — direct file access, raw table dumps, scraping a read-only interface — and translate it into a clean, modern format your current systems can use.
Botched data migrations between SaaS platforms
Moved CRM, helpdesk, e-commerce or finance platform and discovered the migration wasn't quite as clean as the salesperson promised? We compare what should have moved against what actually moved, identify the gaps, and write a targeted migration to close them — without disrupting the live system you're now relying on.
How a data recovery engagement works
Most data recovery jobs start with a same-day phone call. The first thing we'll usually ask you to do is stop writing — to the affected database, the affected files, the affected SaaS account — because every change after the incident potentially overwrites something that could have been recovered. We'll talk you through how to freeze the situation safely.
Next is a short, paid assessment — typically a day or two. We take a working copy of whatever's available (snapshots, dumps, logs, backups, exports) into an isolated environment, work out what's actually recoverable and what isn't, and come back to you with a written assessment and a fixed quote for the recovery itself. You can stop there if you want — there's no pressure to commit to the full job.
Then we recover. Throughout, work happens on encrypted environments, only the named engineers on the project have access, and everything is covered by a written NDA from the very first conversation. When we hand back, we deliver the recovered data in a format your team can actually use — not a raw forensic dump — along with a written summary of what we recovered, what we couldn't, and why.
Stopping it from happening again
The honest truth is that almost every data recovery job we handle could have been avoided by a backup or process change costing a fraction of the recovery itself. Once the immediate fire is out, we'll always offer to write you a short, plain-English disaster recovery plan: what gets backed up, how often, where the copies live, how quickly the business can be back up after various failure scenarios, and — crucially — how you'll know if the backups themselves stop working.
For ongoing peace of mind, we offer a low-cost backup-monitoring and quarterly restore-test service. It's deliberately unglamorous, and it's the cheapest insurance policy your business will ever buy.
Discreet, UK-based, no jargon
Data loss is stressful and often embarrassing — particularly when it's somebody else's fault and you're explaining it to your board. We've handled enough of these situations to know how to talk about them calmly, in plain English, without making anyone feel worse than they already do. Everything is confidential by default. If you think your business has lost data it can't afford to lose, get in touch through the contact form and we'll come back the same day.