Some data loss can wait for Tuesday; some genuinely cannot — payroll locked in a dead server, a court deadline on a corrupt drive, the only copy of tomorrow’s deliverable. The emergency track exists for the second kind. This page is honest about what priority buys, what it cannot, and how to tell which kind of emergency you actually have.
Priority moves your job to the front of the queue the moment it arrives, keeps it moving through evenings and weekends, and puts an engineer on the phone with you rather than a ticket number. Diagnosis happens within hours of arrival; imaging starts the same day; progress is reported in plain sentences, as often as you need them.
What it never changes is the physics. A weak drive still has to be imaged gently — rushing reads on failing hardware is how emergencies become tragedies — so the honest promise is every safe hour used, not corners cut.
Two questions sort it. Is money or a deadline burning while the data is gone? A stopped business, a legal date, an event that won’t rerun — genuine emergencies. Will waiting make the recovery harder? Ransomware mid-spread, a drive degrading audibly, a NAS about to “repair” itself — also yes. If neither is true, the standard track gets the identical result for less, and we’ll say so on the phone rather than sell you urgency.
Either way, the first response is free: call, describe it, and get a straight answer about which track fits before anything is committed.
Power the affected device down — cleanly if it’s alive, and leave it dead if it’s dead. Disconnect anything ransomware-touched from the network. Photograph server bays before disks move. Start no rebuilds, no reinstalls, no scans. Then ring 0141 404 0294: out of hours the line takes messages that are actually read, and priority jobs get called straight back with a plan and a realistic timeline.
Priority handling is quoted alongside the standard figure for your device — single drives from the £300 + VAT band, multi-disk systems from £500 + VAT — so the premium is a number you see, not a surprise you discover. Everything starts with a free diagnostic, the figure goes in writing before work begins, and on most jobs nothing is owed unless the data comes back. No hourly meter, no evaluation fee, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Yes — the emergency track runs evenings and weekends for exactly this. Leave a message with a number; priority calls come back fast with honest triage: what to freeze, whether the situation truly needs the premium, and when imaging can realistically begin. Downed-business jobs jump the queue the moment they arrive.
No — and for good reason. Safe recovery needs the imaging hardware, donor stock and laminar-flow hood that live on the bench, and “on-site recovery” usually means risky improvisation on your original media. What we do instead: guide you by phone through safe shutdown and disk removal, then turn the job around at priority speed once it lands here.
It improves the timeline, not the odds — and we’d rather tell you that than imply otherwise. The same careful method runs either way; priority buys immediate attention and out-of-hours effort. Where speed genuinely protects data — degrading drives, spreading ransomware — getting it here today is what helps, and priority makes today possible.
Diagnosis within hours of arrival; simple logical jobs sometimes same-day; a failing drive as fast as gentle imaging allows, often 24–72 hours; multi-disk arrays longer, worked continuously. You’ll get a realistic estimate at diagnosis and updates as it moves — never a fantasy deadline invented to win the job.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from anywhere in the UK. The work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
The free first response sorts real emergencies from expensive panic — and if yours is real, the bench clears for it. Emergency data recovery for Glasgow: 0141 404 0294, priority handling, honest physics.