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R3 Provide data recovery throughout the British Isles, Northern Ireland, Eire, Europe, US & Worldwide.

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R3 is a real data recovery lab in the UK

A Real Hard Drive Recovery Case Study

Data loss can happen at any time and can happen in the most unexpected ways. As long as your device hasn't been stolen (we're not that good 🙂), we can recover your data from the most unlikely disasters.

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★★★★★

Excellent service! Excellent professionals!

Emile from London, United Kingdom


  • Drive Received - 13/09/2016 - 10:57 am

    A WD drive was received and booked into our database noting serial numbers and anything unique to the drive. Customer also informed of arrival.

  • Diagnostics - 13/09/2016 - 11:22 am

    Drive was diagnosed by one of our engineers. The engineer diagnosed it as stiction and put it in our clean room for an internal inspection.

  • Clean Room Inspection - 13/09/2016 - 12:04 pm

    The clean room inspection confirmed the engineer's thoughts and the drive did in fact have stiction. Stiction is when the drives read/write get stuck on the platters, normally due to an impact happening with the drive like it being dropped while spinning for example.

  • Parts Needed - 13/09/2016 - 12:25 pm

    Jobs was then set to parts needed, a lab assistant was then given the task of finding a matching donor for the drive so that the engineers could do a head swap.

  • Parts Sent to Client - 13/09/2016 - 12:45 pm

    Matching parts was found, tested and passed to the engineers to begin the re-build.

  • Cloning - 13/09/2016 - 1:30 pm

    Head swap complete and successful, engineers now doing a sector by sector clone of the drive.

  • Cloning Complete/Data Transfer - 14/09/2016 - 03:43 pm

    Cloning of the drive complete, image drive now passed to a lab assistant to begin the data transfer stage of the recovery i.e. copying the customers data to an RM (Return Media)

  • File List Sent - 15/09/2016 - 02:33 pm

    File listing an integrity check sent to the customer, all customers of R3 get a free file listing and integrity check. What this is a representation of the data we have recovered from your failed/failing device.

  • Invoiced - 15/09/2016 - 4:03 pm

    Customer was then invoice for the work carried out for him.

  • Paid - 16/09/2016 - 5:00 pm

    Our accounts team then confirmed customer had paid invoice and the drive was returned to them on the same day.

Here is what the customer email us just hours after receiving his data back:

Hi Will,

Just wanted to say a big thank you to you and R3 for the recovery - from what I can tell nearly all files are intact and usable, so a great result.

Thanks for your help, much appreciated.

This is just one of the many hard drive recovery jobs that we complete on a day to day basis even faster than the time frame indicates. We aim to get all jobs done as quickly as possible no matter the service level (Budget, Standard or Emergency). If you need our help give us a call on 0800 999 3282 or alternatively email us at enquiries@r3datarecovery.com and one of our memer of the team will be in touch with you as soon as possible.