Hard drives, SSDs, NVMe blades, RAID sets, servers, NAS boxes and memory cards, recovered for Leicester and the shire by post.
A tower disk that has started ticking rather than spinning. An NVMe blade the BIOS quietly stopped listing overnight. A four-bay NAS that dropped its second disk halfway through a rebuild, on the one morning the whole office needed it. A card home from a weekend shoot insisting it is empty. None of those is an unusual parcel here, and very few of them turn out to be the end of the story. Establishing what can still be read costs you nothing, and where there is a job worth doing the figure is agreed in writing before a single screw is turned.
Nearly every Leicester job runs the same way. Your media goes to the Cambridge bench, you hear what can be read back and what it would cost, and then you take as long as you like over the decision. Nobody pays to be told.
Finding out is free, and the figure that follows is the figure you pay. The bands are printed here instead of being held back until you telephone: £250 + VAT a card or stick, £300 + VAT a drive or SSD, from £500 + VAT an array. The whole table, with what sits behind each line, is on the data recovery cost page.
Work is not sorted here by how impressive it looks. A pen drive snapped off in a laptop port and a shelf of SAS disks out of a server room get the same attention and the same order of operations. Nothing is priced until somebody has had the media in front of them, and after that a single service covers the lot: folders deleted by mistake, volumes that now read as nonsense, drives that met a staircase, boards that took a surge off the mains, platters that will not turn at all. Choose the nearest thing from the grid, or telephone and describe it in whatever words you have — whoever picks up has spent years reading these symptoms and will not be reaching for a script.
A computer that has stopped listing a drive is usually sitting next to a drive that…
There is no noise to listen for. A solid state drive that has failed gives exactly the…
Nothing else in a computer stops this suddenly. There is no warning noise and no slow…
A great deal gets photographed around Leicestershire and very little of it ever gets…
A finished dissertation, a month of payroll, the only remaining copy of the books, and…
These jobs always land at the wrong hour. A machine gives up on the morning something…
Under a desk in most houses sits a tower holding every photograph the family owns, and…
Grey screen and nothing after it. Or a question mark folder flashing in the middle of…
MacBooks do not make a fuss on the way out. The charger stops being accepted, or the…
The drive that gets knocked onto the floor is invariably the one carrying the only…
A box humming quietly on a shelf turns out to have been carrying the company accounts…
The cameras did their part. Then the recorder failed, or the loop came round and wrote…
The alert panel had not been looked at for months, so the first failure passed…
Shared storage has one unpleasant property: when it stops, everything above it stops in…
Every document renamed with an extension nobody recognises, and a note in each folder…
A blue screen wanting forty-eight digits, and nobody in the building with any idea…
A laptop comes back tidier than anyone remembers it being, the person who handed it…
Telephone 0800 689 0668, or let the diagnostic form put the questions to you. Plain words are fine — describe it as you would over a fence. There is no vocabulary test.
A tracked, insured parcel from any Leicestershire address is on the bench the next working day. Driving is about seventy miles, M1 to Junction 19 then the A14 east, and reception takes drop-offs. Nobody collects.
From booking-in the clock runs 2 working days. You are told what has failed, given an honest reading of the odds, and quoted one price that does not move afterwards.
Say yes and everything recovered travels home on an encrypted drive, usually 2 to 4 working days on a single disk. Say no and the media is returned to you.
The post office does most of the work of getting a job here. A drive that is already unwell travels better boxed and insured than rattling around a car for a day of errands, and something dropped into a Leicestershire postbox this afternoon is generally logged in at Cambridge tomorrow.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.
"Twenty years of the shop's accounts sat on one external drive, which stopped mounting on a Friday afternoon. I posted it Monday, had the price on Wednesday, and the lot came back on a fresh drive inside the week. At no stage was I sold something I had not asked about."
Helen T · Loughborough"Our Synology lost a disk, then lost a second one while it was rebuilding, and the firm we pay for support went quiet on us. Every member was copied before anything else happened, the volume was put back together from those copies, and nine years of drawings came out of it. Direct answers from the first call."
Andrew P · Hinckley"My son stood on his laptop a fortnight before hand-in and a repair shop told him the disk was scrap. It was not. The drive came out, the coursework was read off it, and the invoice was the number I had already agreed in writing, to the penny."
Sam R · Market HarboroughBegin in Leicester itself — the Golden Mile and Belgrave Road, the Cultural Quarter, the streets around the two universities and De Montfort, the trade parks out towards Fosse Park — and then work outwards. Loughborough and its engineering firms, Melton Mowbray, Hinckley beside the M69, Market Harborough down the A6, Coalville and Ashby-de-la-Zouch on the Charnwood side, Wigston, Oadby and Syston around the city's edge, and Lutterworth, where the distribution sheds at Magna Park back onto the motorway. Every job travels by tracked next-day post, which is why a parcel handed over a counter in Ashby is treated no differently from one posted on the Golden Mile, and why a company whose server has stopped starts the job at a post office round the corner rather than surrendering half a day to the M1. Where a whole office has gone down, the guide to what a disaster recovery plan actually has to cover is worth the ten minutes it takes to read. Each town has its own page, listed on data recovery Leicestershire.
Some enquiries already know exactly what they are looking at. These pages go straight to the point rather than starting from the hardware:
Nothing to pay for the answer, one written figure afterwards, and £300 + VAT covers any single drive or SSD.