We all look forward to that.

You appear to be saying much of what needs to be said for both sides of the Atlantic, in our conversations earlier this year we have been able to see that the only thing that counts is capital as a lab we need capital to develop and research, as a reseller you just need enough for your next sports car or holiday in Las Vegas (believe me we have them in the UK too).

I have used some of my capital to build a team of professionals which if I can find them should become 30 or more by next year..

I too have been a watcher especially of the UK industry, and was so disgusted with the service levels and number of resellers that are just there to pick the meat off and throw back anything they cannot cope with.

We see a lot of Media type operations trying to be Data Recovery Labs, we caught one this year clicking away on our adwords….. called them up it was a team of South Africans in London who make the same claim of spending on their filters regularly but their books lodged with companies house show differrent.

It is supposedly a company, incorporated at companies house (UK register of companies who are tracked to ensure they exist or have a credit history) and yet only one manager / technicain and representing other international companies under differrent names and a total wage bill of $30,000.

No accounts and desperate to bring in any work they can to survive…… well as we all know if you are desperate things can go wrong.

But they have a nice website

I had to find a way to build the abc Data Recovery Ltd from scratch without becoming another reseller. So I planned and built all the resources to meet the needs of the business. Our ISO-3 certified (fed 209e class1) clean room is possibly the best in the UK indeed Monmouth Scientific Ltd said it was the best data recovery clean room they had tested ever.

We have seen a number of jobs including raid 0 & raid 5 of late from clients over quoted by data recovery resellers and my staff deal with them as a norm .

But the resellers seem to want to milk every job for every hour and this is diluting the industry.

With 20 staff and a growing organisation I too know the difficulties of developing a good operation and I have been very critical of my own companies need to grow and not become complacent at its success, after all as independants who are we really competing with.. mainly those that operate globally.

A whitepaper will soon be published about the state of the UK Data Recovery Industry and it will be interesting to see the parallels in the US how many of these operations are named and shamed in the National Press and online.

Remember the whole of the Data Recovery Industry is in disarray and needs strong R&D to progress….. unfortunately we are not growing as fast as the Chinese one lab has added 30 staff this year alone (now 45) and is planning even more so if you want to compete only economies of scale will work and this may explain Ontracks recent announcements…

Andy Butler

abc Data Recovery Ltd UK

great article!
many people don’t realize that data recovery can be an expensive proposition (in spite of all the “free” stuff available.

Perhaps a part of the problem is that many sysadmins don’t have any experience with recovery companies and just google for it and send it to the 1st or 2nd – reliable looking – hit, without any in-depth research.