When a production RAID drops offline in the middle of a business day, when a law firm’s file server refuses to mount the morning of a filing deadline, when a hospital’s scheduling database won’t come back after an overnight power event — the clock is different. Every additional hour of downtime carries a cost that a standard data recovery queue isn’t designed to absorb. Emergency data recovery exists for exactly these situations: cases where the standard 4-8 business day path is too slow, and where a lab needs to be able to compress its evaluation, engineering, and delivery timelines into the shortest window the physics of the failure actually allows.

Gillware has performed emergency data recoveries for more than two decades. This page covers how our emergency service works, what turnaround times realistically look like across device types, who the service is built for, and how to reach us if you’re in an active emergency right now.

How to reach us in an emergency

Our online intake at gillware.com is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The Gillware AI assistant on the site can capture initial device and failure details at any hour, and any submission flagged as an emergency triggers direct notification to our on-call client advisors and engineering leads — regardless of the time of day.

If you’re submitting outside business hours, an advisor will be in contact with you as soon as the notification reaches them. In most cases that means a return call or email before the next morning, and often much sooner. This path exists specifically for organizations facing production-critical downtime; the on-call escalation is reserved for genuine emergency situations rather than routine consumer inquiries about recovering photos or documents, which are handled through our standard business-hours intake.

For situations where the case is unambiguous and you already know the device and failure mode — a RAID that dropped offline, a server that won’t POST, a SAN LUN that’s showing zero bytes — the fastest path is to start the case immediately through our submission form. Overnight shipping labels are generated as soon as the case is opened, and the device enters our priority queue the moment it arrives at the lab.

Our client advisor line at 877-624-7206 is staffed during business hours for consultative pre-case conversations, quoting, and case status updates. Emergencies routed through the online intake are not held for business hours to reach engineering — that’s the entire purpose of the priority notification path.

What “emergency” means in our lab

Every data recovery case Gillware handles moves through the same core stages: intake, evaluation, engineering, testing, and delivery. Each stage has a queue. In a standard service case, your device sits in each queue behind other cases based on order of arrival. In an emergency case, your device moves to the front of every queue.

Concretely, that means:

Evaluation is accelerated. A standard evaluation is scheduled into the normal engineering rotation. An emergency evaluation is picked up by the next available senior engineer, often within hours of the device arriving at the lab.

Engineering runs on dedicated time. For emergency cases with viable recovery paths, we assign engineering hours specifically to that case rather than interleaving it with the standard queue. On complex cases this can mean an engineer working the case in extended shifts to compress calendar time.

Testing and delivery are prioritized. Once the recovery is complete, verification and delivery are pushed to the top of the outbound queue. Delivery method — encrypted destination drive, secure electronic transfer, or overnight physical media — is set at intake so nothing waits on logistics decisions at the end of the case.

Emergency service is not a promise that every case gets done faster; the physics of the specific failure sets a lower bound. A single failed hard drive with clean head-swap requirements has a different floor than a 36-drive SAN with 30+ TB of data to image and reconstruct. What emergency service guarantees is that we spend every hour the case allows working the case, rather than the hours the queue happens to allocate.

Emergency service tiers

In-lab expedited. The default emergency path. Your device ships to our Madison, Wisconsin lab under an overnight label we provide, moves to the front of every queue on arrival, and is worked continuously until recovery is complete. This is the right tier for failed RAIDs and SANs, failed servers, failed enterprise SSDs, mechanically failed hard drives, and any case requiring donor parts, cleanroom work, or firmware-level intervention. Turnaround is typically 24-72 hours for straightforward mechanical or firmware failures on single drives, and 3-5 business days for large multi-drive arrays where machine time dominates the schedule.

Remote recovery. Available when the device is logically failed but hardware is stable — accidental deletions, filesystem corruption, RAID metadata damage on a still-running array, ransomware-hit systems where the underlying storage is intact. Our engineers connect to your system through a secure encrypted session, image what needs imaging, and perform the recovery against the image without the device ever leaving your site. This is the right tier for cases where shipping would introduce unacceptable risk, downtime, or chain-of-custody complications. Turnaround is often measured in hours rather than days. Learn more about our remote data recovery service.

On-site emergency response. For cases where the data cannot leave the premises for regulatory, security, or physical reasons — classified environments, certain healthcare and financial-sector situations, storage systems too large to ship practically. An engineer travels to your site with the equipment needed to work the case in place. This tier is reserved for cases where the constraints of the environment genuinely require it; most emergencies are faster and less expensive to resolve through in-lab expedited service.

Who emergency service is built for

The buyers who use emergency service most often are running mission-critical storage where downtime carries a directly measurable cost.

Legal. Failed file servers or document management system storage in the middle of active litigation, where a filing deadline, discovery production timeline, or trial calendar can’t move.

Healthcare. EMR servers, imaging archive storage, and scheduling systems where downtime translates into cancelled procedures, rescheduled patient care, and HIPAA-adjacent compliance exposure.

Financial services. Trading firm data, accounting systems, and compliance archive storage where regulatory reporting windows are non-negotiable and every hour of downtime is directly measurable in dollars.

Media and production. Editorial storage during active post-production, on-location data from shoots that can’t be re-created, and broadcast-adjacent workflows where a delivery deadline is fixed by contract.

MSPs and IT operations. MSP clients under SLA when a NAS or server fails, and internal IT departments handling production-critical storage where the business is effectively offline until the array is back.

Manufacturing. MES, historian, and SCADA-adjacent storage where a line-down condition costs meaningful dollars per hour and shift.

If your organization sits in any of these situations and standard service turnaround isn’t compatible with the downtime you can absorb, emergency service is the right conversation to open.

What emergency service costs

Emergency service typically runs two to four times the cost of the equivalent standard-service recovery, with the specific multiple depending on the calendar compression required, the size and complexity of the array, and whether the case runs in-lab, remote, or on-site.

The core Gillware pricing model still applies. There are no upfront fees. Evaluations are free. Continental US shipping to our lab is covered with a prepaid overnight label we generate at case submission. And if we don’t achieve the objectives of your case — the “no data, no charge” commitment — you don’t owe us for the emergency work either. Emergency pricing raises the ceiling, not the floor.

For a discussion of what your specific case is likely to cost, our advisors can give a realistic price and turnaround range once we have the basic device and failure details.

Why the choice of lab matters more in an emergency

A lab that can offer genuine emergency service needs three things in place before your case arrives: a working cleanroom, engineering staff experienced enough to make correct decisions under compressed timelines, and an inventory of donor parts deep enough that a case isn’t blocked waiting for a component to arrive from a supplier.

Gillware maintains an ISO 5 Class 100 cleanroom bench, an engineering team that includes multiple staff members with 20,000+ hours of individual data recovery experience, and a hard drive donor library covering thousands of unique drive families and firmware revisions. Under time pressure, none of those elements can be created on demand — a lab either has them in place before your call or it doesn’t. That’s the practical difference between labs that market emergency service and labs that can execute it.

Since 2004, Gillware has recovered data from more than 100,000 storage devices across the full range of consumer, business, and enterprise storage — from single hard drives to multi-controller SANs. The engineering depth that emergency service depends on is built over years, not on the day the call comes in.

What we don’t do

Emergency service is scoped to storage-layer data recovery on physical or logical failures. It is not incident response, forensic investigation, or breach containment — those are separate service lines with their own workflow. If you’re mid-incident and need help understanding whether the underlying storage is recoverable at all, our emergency intake is the right first step; we can scope the recovery portion and coordinate with your incident response team on the rest.

Start an emergency case now

If you’re actively in an emergency, the fastest path is the online intake. Case submission triggers advisor notification directly; overnight shipping labels are generated immediately; the case enters our priority queue the moment your device is scanned in at our lab.

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