Hard drives, SSDs, NVMe, RAID sets, NAS boxes and memory cards, recovered for customers in Bracknell, Berkshire and London through the post.
A desktop drive that now makes a ticking noise instead of starting up normally. An NVMe module that has quietly disappeared from the BIOS instead of being listed there. A four-bay NAS box that lost its second disk during a rebuild, on the day everyone needed it. A card back from a weekend shoot that reports itself as being empty. Each one of these cases has been delivered to us before and is nothing out of the ordinary, and only a handful of them actually turn out to be the end of the matter. It will cost you absolutely nothing to find out which data remains readable, and if there is recovery work worth doing, the figure is written down before anyone opens anything.
Most Bracknell jobs follow the same format. First comes a quote, then the media travels to our Guildford bench. Once you have been told about the data that can be read back and how much it would cost, you make a decision at your leisure. Being told is never the part you pay for.
There's no charge for finding out, and the price given after this is fixed. Each band is published here instead of being held back until you ring: £250 + VAT for each card or stick, £300 + VAT for each drive or SSD, from £500 + VAT for an array. All of them are set out on the data recovery cost page.
The same workbench and the same two hands are used for a broken pen drive as they are for a twenty-disk SAN. Nothing is priced until someone has taken a look at what you've got; once that happens, one service covers everything, whether that is files accidentally erased, volume corruption, drives dropped down stairs, electrical surges through boards or platters that will no longer turn. Choose a device from the grid, or call and tell us about it in whatever language you want to use (the person answering has worked with these faults since the time when storage was measured in megabytes, and does not follow a script).
Normally when your PC stops listing a particular drive, all the files which have…
When an SSD stops working it does so in silence, and owners find that far harder…
Nothing else in a computer shuts down as abruptly as one of these. You don't…
So much photography goes on around this corner of Berkshire, and nearly all of those…
The final draft of your dissertation, a month's worth of payroll, the last remaining copy…
What makes these jobs so difficult is the timing of them. The machine will typically give…
The majority of families use the tower under the desk to hold every photograph…
Grey screen, and nothing after it. Or a question mark folder flashing away in the…
A MacBook rarely makes much of a fuss on the way out. It will no longer accept…
It is nearly always the drive with the only copy on it that gets knocked…
A quiet unit sitting on a shelf turns out to have been holding the company's accounting…
The CCTV cameras did what they were supposed to do. Then either the recorder failed…
No-one was checking the alert panel for months, so the first failure went unnoticed, and…
When shared storage fails, everything that sits on top of it fails at once, and…
On a Monday morning nothing will open. Every file name now contains a suffix…
You get a blue screen asking you to enter forty-eight digits, and there is no…
A recovery job is complete when the files come back. A forensic job is only finished…
Call 0800 689 0668, or fill in the diagnostic form and it will do the questioning. Tell us about the problem using whatever description you would give to a neighbour. No vocabulary test is being set here.
After receiving your quote, send it by tracked, insured post (or a courier you book yourself) from a Berkshire, Surrey or London address and it is on the bench the next working day. Alternatively, you may prefer to hand it in personally at our Guildford lab, approximately forty minutes by road on the A322 and the A3, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no prior appointment required. We do not collect.
Once it is booked in, the clock is 2 working days. You are then told what has failed, given an honest read on the odds, and handed one price that will not move.
Approve this figure and everything recovered is returned to you on an encrypted drive, which normally takes 2 to 4 working days on a single disk.
Nearly all of the jobs that we see arrive by parcel. Firstly you need to get a quote, either over the phone or with our free online diagnostic; once that has been done, sending the drive by tracked, insured post is one of the calmest ways to move a drive that may be struggling anyway, and most drives handed over in Berkshire, Surrey or London will arrive on the Guildford bench the very next working day.
Is the hard drive still bolted into a machine, whether that is a laptop, a tower, an iMac, a MacBook, a rack server or a DVR stored under the till? Get a quote first, then pull the drive out of the machine and send only the bare drive (never the entire machine): from a server the disks come out labelled by bay, and from a DVR you just send the disk. Stripping hardware is not something our lab does, though any repair shop on your high street can do it in about ten minutes. The one case with no way round it is memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and certain ultrabooks are built, and that storage is not taken on. Call us first if you're not sure which kind you have. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
With your quote in hand, the name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell takes roughly forty minutes along the A322 followed by the A3, and you do not need an appointment; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as the package has been logged onto our system, and two working days after that the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure which items should go in the box? Call 0800 689 0668 whilst the box is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it guide you.
"A Seagate Backup Plus holding fifteen years of family photographs went from clicking to completely silent. It went off to Guildford on the Monday, the price came back on the Wednesday, and the whole lot arrived on a new drive the week after. Not once was I sold anything I had not asked for."
Rachel M · Wokingham"Our practice NAS dropped a second disk during a rebuild and the support company stopped answering. Every disk was imaged before a thing was touched, the array was put back together from the copies, and eleven years of case files came back. Straight answers from the first phone call onwards."
Daniel K · Camberley"Two days before a hand-in, my daughter caught her laptop with her knee and left half a USB stick still in the port. The connector was rebuilt, the coursework arrived back on a replacement stick with photographs of what had been done, and the invoice matched the quote to the penny."
Priya S · TwickenhamStart in Bracknell Forest and work outwards: Binfield, Warfield, Martins Heron and Bullbrook, then Wokingham and Crowthorne, Sandhurst and the Camberley border, Ascot and Windsor, Maidenhead and Henley-on-Thames. From there, you can follow the whole tech corridor along the M4 from Reading through to Slough. Past the M25, the same bench serves ten London districts as well: Croydon, Bromley, Sutton, Kingston upon Thames, Wimbledon, Richmond, Twickenham, Hounslow, Ealing and Hammersmith. Since every job moves by tracked next-day post, a parcel handed in at Sandhurst is dealt with in the same way as one posted in Hammersmith. A firm whose server has stopped gets a quote first, after which it can start the job at a post office five minutes away (with the disks taken out and labelled by bay) rather than lose half a day travelling round the M25. If an entire office has gone down, the blog clearly sets out what needs to be accounted for in a disaster recovery plan. The home patch is listed town by town on the data recovery Berkshire page, while the capital has a hub of its own at data recovery London.
Across the M25, where a tracked parcel typically beats carrying a drive across town to a shop that would only send it out to a lab anyway:
The diagnosis is free, the quote is just one written figure, and a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT.