Setting up a Manchester Data Recovery Lab

This post is about how I set up my own data recovery lab in Manchester. Technically, it was easy, having worked in data recovery for years I knew exactly what I wanted (but didn't have the money to do it), and I also knew many contacts within the industry who could help me and I was also confident I'd get the work in too.

There is another side to setting up the lab of course, it's not just all about technical wizardry and know how. Behind all that comes the infrastructure. You need a decent building where you can put a clean room, it needs to be a new building that is damp free and also free from particulates that contaminate the air. Essential to the creation of our data recovery lab was the financial company that made it all possible - Manchester Mortgages from the web site http://manchestermortgages.co.uk/. Our dealings with Andy Butterworth we easy and he dealt with all the financial stuff that we didn't have time for (or wanted to). He was able to arrange a mortgage with a Manchester lender within a few days and had our mortgage offer out to us in the post by the end of the week.

In fact I was able to buy not only the building for the lab but also equip the lab with the mortgage money that Manchester Mortgages arranged for us. Paying it back over 15 years, I would need to clear a little over £2000 per month to service this debt. Seeing as much recovery work was bringing in close to £30000 per month, this was a mortgage debt I was confident I'd be able to handle.

So with the building under construction and the mortgage in place, we were able to consider what we wanted the data recovery lab to look like and how we wanted it arrange. We designed two separate areas, one for hard drive recovery and the other for phone recovery. The hard drive area was to be equipped with the industry standard PC3000 from Acelab. The mobile phone recovery area was to be populated most with Cellebrite recovery equipment. Now Cellebrite is ok for most phone recovery applications, but there seem to be a lot of people in Manchester who drop their phones into water and then need their data back when they discover that their phones no longer switch on. Cellebrite is no good for situations like this at it relies on mobile phones that still switch on. Therefore the phone recovery area also required a lot more phone repair equipment - soldering stations and spare parts etc.