Data loss is rarely dramatic. Most of the time it's quiet — a migration script that silently dropped 4% of customer records, a backup that's been failing for six months without anyone noticing, a CRM that crashed mid-import and left half the company's pipeline in an unreadable state. By the time anyone realises, the obvious fixes have already been tried and made the situation worse.
We're a Bolton-based software team that helps businesses across Greater Manchester recover data from corrupt databases, failed migrations, abandoned legacy systems and inherited messes. We don't oversell what's possible — sometimes data is genuinely gone — but we'll tell you that on the first call rather than three weeks and a five-figure invoice later.
What we recover
Database recovery
Corrupt or unreadable SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and Azure SQL databases. We work from the underlying files, transaction logs and any partial backups that exist, and rebuild as much usable data as the storage layer still holds. Where the database itself is fine but the application has lost its data — wrong WHERE clause in an UPDATE, accidental DROP, an import that overwrote production with staging — we can usually reconstruct from logs and replicas if we're called early.
Migration and integration recovery
Migrations between systems are where most data loss actually happens. We rebuild data after botched ERP cutovers, CRM migrations that mangled custom fields, e-commerce platform moves that lost order history, and integrations that quietly failed for weeks before anyone noticed. We reconcile what's in each system, rebuild the missing records from whatever raw exports survive, and document the gaps you'll have to live with.
File and document recovery
Recovering files and document stores after ransomware events (where the underlying storage still reads), accidental deletions, broken syncs between cloud services, and migrations between Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Dropbox-style platforms. We focus on the software side — for physically failed disks you'll need a clean-room lab, and we're happy to recommend one.
Legacy system data extraction
That ten-year-old application nobody dares touch, sitting on an old server in the corner — we extract its data into formats your current systems can use. Often that's the first step in finally retiring the legacy box without losing the history.
How a recovery engagement works
The first call is always free and always honest. We need to understand what happened, when, what's been tried since, and what state the underlying systems are in now. Most of the time we can give you a realistic view of what's recoverable within an hour. If we don't think we're the right people, we'll say so.
From there, we move into a short triage phase: take read-only copies of everything relevant before any further changes, freeze the worst of the damage, and produce a written recovery plan with a fixed price for the work. The cardinal rule of data recovery is "stop making it worse" — almost every case we see has been damaged further by well-meaning attempts to fix it before specialists were called in.
Hardening the business afterwards
Recovery without prevention is half a job. Once your data is back, we review the failure honestly with you and put proper safeguards in place: tested backups, off-site and immutable copies, defined retention, monitored restore drills, tighter access controls, and a written disaster-recovery playbook your team can actually follow at 3am. We can run quarterly DR drills as part of an ongoing support contract — usually the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy.
Why a local Bolton partner matters in a crisis
When you're losing money by the hour and a regulator is asking awkward questions, you don't want to be on a video call with a vendor in a different time zone explaining your business from scratch. We're based on Bark Street in central Bolton and can be on-site across Bolton, Bury, Wigan, Salford and Manchester inside the same day during a serious incident. UK working hours, UK law, UK data protection — and a real human voice on the phone.
Every recovery engagement is covered by a mutual NDA as standard. We use named accounts, take only the minimum access we need, and provide a full audit log of every action we take on your systems.
Get help fast
If you're in the middle of a data loss event right now, send a short note through the contact form with what's happened and how to reach you. We'll triage it the same working day. If you're not in an active incident but suspect your backups wouldn't actually save you, we'd rather have that conversation today than after something has already gone wrong.