Computer Disaster Recovery Singapore

Most people searching for disaster recovery want one of two very different things. Either they want to plan ahead — backups, failover, continuity — or something has already gone wrong and the data is sitting on damaged hardware right now. This page is about the second one.

A flood in a Singapore shophouse basement, a lightning surge through an unprotected power strip, a server room that ran hot over a long weekend, a ransomware payload that walked the network on a Friday night — the hardware afterwards is rarely uniformly dead. Platters usually survive fire that destroys the enclosure. Boards die while the media underneath is intact. Arrays lose their configuration while every member disk still holds its stripe.

That gap between "the computer is destroyed" and "the data is gone" is the whole job. We have run this lab for over 20 years and completed more than 140,000 recoveries, and across all case types our success rate sits between 85% and 95% — though a disaster case genuinely can fall either side of that, and we will tell you which after the diagnosis rather than before it.

More disaster-hit data is lost in the hours after the event than during it. The instinct is to check whether it still works. That instinct is the problem.

• Do not keep powering it on to see if it comes back. Each attempt on a physically damaged drive drags heads across the platters. This is the single most common way a recoverable case becomes an unrecoverable one.
• Do not dry a wet drive, and do not open it. Water leaves residue as it evaporates and corrosion accelerates in air. A drive that is still damp is usually in better shape than one someone has dried. Keep it sealed and get it to a lab.
• Do not rebuild or resync a failed array. A rebuild writes across the very disks holding your only copy. If a RAID has dropped members, power it down and label the disks in bay order first.
• Do not run recovery software on the original media. Scanning writes, and it keeps the patient under load. Work from an image, never the original.
• Do not reinstall the operating system to "get it working again". That overwrites exactly the structures a recovery depends on.
• After ransomware, do not wipe and restore until the data is secured. Encrypted files and shadow copies are sometimes partially recoverable, but not once they have been overwritten.

If the machine is on and behaving oddly, the safest single action is to shut it down cleanly and stop using it.

In Singapore the pattern is fairly consistent. Water and power dominate, and both are seasonal.

• Water — burst pipes, aircon condensate over a rack, monsoon flooding in ground-floor and basement units. Usually survivable if it reaches us before corrosion sets in.
• Power surge and lightning — takes out the drive's control board while leaving the platters or NAND untouched. Often one of the better outcomes.
• Fire and heat — the enclosure and electronics go first. Sealed media frequently survives what the chassis does not.
• Ransomware and malware — see our ransomware recovery page for what is and is not realistic.
• RAID and NAS failure — a second disk failing mid-rebuild, a controller dying, or an array that reports its volume as crashed.
• Physical shock and theft recovery — dropped machines, and drives recovered from damaged premises.
• Human error — a migration that overwrote the source, a reformatted volume, a deletion nobody noticed until the backup rotated out.

Disaster cases rarely arrive as a single tidy drive. They arrive as whatever was in the room.

• Desktops and workstations — internal drives pulled from damaged machines.
• Laptops — including boards soaked or burnt beyond use. See laptop data recovery.
• Servers and RAID arrays — reconstructed without the original controller where necessary. See server recovery and RAID recovery.
• NAS units — Synology, QNAP and others. See NAS recovery.
• External drives, SSDs, USB sticks and memory cards.

Work is carried out in our own cleanroom lab at 6 Harper Road. Media does not leave Singapore for the recovery.

1. Triage, same day where possible. Tell us what happened and what the hardware has been through. Water, fire and surge cases are time-sensitive and we will say so on the call.
2. Free diagnosis. We establish what is physically wrong and what is readable. You get a written finding, not a verbal guess.
3. Fixed written quote. Before any recovery work starts. If we do not believe it is recoverable, we say that instead of charging you to find out slowly.
4. Stabilise, then image. Cleaning, board repair or parts as needed — then a sector-level image. All recovery work happens on the image, never the original.
5. Reconstruct and extract. Array geometry, file systems and databases rebuilt from the image.
6. You verify before you pay. We give you a file listing to check. Payment follows your confirmation, not ours.

Business disasters do not wait for office hours. Call +65 6588 0261 and say it is an emergency — priority handling means the case goes to the front of the queue rather than into the normal order.

We sign NDAs for business customers as a matter of routine, and we do not disclose client names or describe the contents of anyone's files. If your case involves personal data, note that recovery is a processing activity under the PDPA and we handle it accordingly.

If the media is encrypted — BitLocker, FileVault, a self-encrypting drive — recovery requires your own password or recovery key. We cannot bypass encryption, and any lab that says otherwise is telling you something untrue.

Price follows the damage, not the panic. A surge-damaged drive needing a board repair sits at the lower end. A flooded multi-disk array needing cleanroom work on several members sits at the higher end.

What does not change: the diagnosis is free, the quote is fixed and in writing before work begins, and you verify the recovered files before paying. See data recovery cost for the current ranges.

Bring the hardware to 6 Harper Road, Leong Huat Building #05-02, Singapore 369674 — beside Tai Seng MRT — or call first if it is wet, burnt or business-critical, because how you transport it matters.

You will get a written diagnosis and a fixed quote before anything is charged. If the answer is that it cannot be recovered, that answer is free too.

My office flooded. Is a wet drive worth trying?
Usually yes, and sooner is much better. Do not dry it and do not power it on. Keep it sealed and bring it in — corrosion, not the water itself, is what finally kills these.

The drive was in a fire. Is there any point?
Often, yes. Fire destroys enclosures and electronics long before it reaches sealed media. We have recovered from drives whose casings were visibly damaged.

A power surge killed the machine. Is the data gone?
Frequently not. Surges tend to take the control board while leaving the platters or NAND intact, which is one of the more recoverable failure modes.

Our RAID failed during a rebuild. Can it be saved?
Often. Stop the rebuild, power the unit down and label the disks in bay order. We reconstruct arrays without the original controller where needed.

How long does it take?
A straightforward case is typically days. Multi-disk and physically damaged cases take longer. We give you a realistic timeframe with the quote, and emergency handling is available.

Do you guarantee recovery?
No, and nobody honestly can. Our success rate across all case types runs 85–95%, but a disaster case depends on what the event did to the media and what was tried afterwards. The free diagnosis is how you find out where yours stands.

• Server data recovery
• RAID data recovery
• NAS data recovery
• Ransomware recovery
• Water-damaged hard drive recovery
• What data recovery costs

We do: recover data from computers, servers, arrays and storage media that have been through fire, flood, power surge, ransomware, physical damage or hardware failure. Cleanroom work, board-level repair, array reconstruction, and extraction to media you can use.

We do not: sell disaster-recovery planning, backup software, failover infrastructure or business-continuity consulting. If you have arrived here looking to prevent the next outage rather than to rescue this one, we are not the right supplier and we would rather say so now.

We also cannot bypass encryption. If the media is encrypted, recovery needs the owner's own password or key. Diagnosis is free, and all work is quoted in writing before it begins.