There is a reputation attached to pricing within this trade for being deliberately foggy, and it is a reputation that has been earned. There is no glamorous fix for this: publish your bands (price ranges), explain which things decide whether a particular job falls into which band, and state clearly what happens when the quoted price is declined.
Nobody wants to read the reasoning before they see the number, therefore below is the complete listing. £250 + VAT will cover memory cards, USB sticks, and pen drives. £300 + VAT will cover any single hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD), with NVMe priced at the same level. £400 + VAT will cover CCTV and DVR recorder drives, and drives which have been encrypted using BitLocker or other encryption methods. From £500 + VAT will cover RAID arrays, network attached storage (NAS) boxes, storage area networks (SANs) and servers, where the cost increases with the number of member disks. £800 + VAT will cover a forensic investigation including a full written report. This completes the table, and below the table there is nothing. And prices for residential customers in Warfield and commercial firms on one of the business parks off the A329(M) remain exactly the same.
What the list doesn't provide is a quotation specifically for your job before someone has examined it. The diagnostic is free (there's no cost), it closes 2 working days after you've booked the device in, and it provides a single, firm number in writing that won't move afterwards. Anyone who has given you a telephone estimate for your recovery based on a spoken description of the symptoms has simply been guessing with your money, and keeps the right to alter that guess once they have your drive in their building. The question worth asking a laboratory is not what it costs but which band the device falls into, because on an honest price list it is the media that decides.
The two different questions that get muddled when discussing recovery pricing need pulling apart, and doing so explains most of the confusion. The type of storage determines the number. The type of fault that occurs is the basis of the payment terms. There are four families of faults, and if you know which family your fault falls into then it helps when you call anyone. A logical fault means the hardware itself was not affected but the organisation of the data was (a deletion, a formatted disk, a damaged index, a lost partition, or an operating system installed on top of the old one). An electronic fault indicates a dead controller board, a failed bridge or a burnt-out power section. A firmware fault indicates that the drive's own code and/or service area has collapsed, and fixing that would require equipment that talks to the disk at a level no operating system ever reaches. A mechanical fault indicates that the heads and/or spindle motor have gone; this would require a head-swap bench, matched donor parts and quite some time.
It's the family, not the cost, that determines how you pay, and the wording used across this network does not vary: in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For jobs with electronic or mechanical failures, and for all chip-level work, we take 50% upfront with the balance only if we recover your data, and all DVR, forensic, BitLocker and ransomware jobs are paid for upfront. So it follows that a logical job that produces nothing produces no bill either. A drive that was damaged by an impact, water, fire or a power fault requires half of the quoted figure upfront, with the remaining balance payable only if we recover your data. This is for an entirely unromantic reason: donor hardware has to be sourced and paid for long before anybody knows how the job ends. If someone tells you differently, be sceptical. No bench that needs to buy parts in advance can put board-level, chip-level or mechanical work on a pay-only-if-recovered basis, and anyone telling you that they do is merely going to find another way to charge you.
There's one case that is worth stating clearly because it is priced wrongly throughout the entire industry. Ransomware pricing follows the hardware. For example, a single encrypted drive is £300 + VAT, while an encrypted server, NAS (network attached storage) or array is from £500 + VAT. This is not a forensic job, it is not charged at £800 + VAT, and the fact that a criminal caused it does not change what the bench physically has to do to the disks.
Two very different devices share that figure because of one particular thing they have in common: each of them must be processed before it can be read by a standard tool. Most CCTV and DVR systems do not use a normal file system. Manufacturers encode video directly into proprietary containers, often as a continuous ring buffer with the index stored separately. Thus, a disk removed from a recorder will generally appear "unformatted" to any computer you attach it to. Therefore, recovering footage from a DVR requires working out which recorder family was used, then how the frames and their timestamps were laid down, and then rebuilding playable footage from that, which is why DVR work is paid upfront rather than only if we recover your data.
Encrypted drives sit in the same price band for another reason: the extra work lies in storing the key material safely and decrypting an image without anything ever being written back to the original drive. Be very clear about this limitation, because it is the honest part. No lab on earth can recover data from a BitLocker volume without a valid key. If you have the 48-digit recovery key, or you can retrieve it from the Microsoft account where it was stored or from your organisation's Active Directory, the job is entirely ordinary. Without anyone anywhere having access to that recovery key, there is simply nothing that can be done with the volume, and any company claiming otherwise is selling you a diagnostic you will end up paying for twice. Before assuming the worst, it is worth reading where BitLocker keys are actually stored, as most people who think theirs is lost have not yet looked in the right place.
Forensic investigations are a different product from recovery services, not a more expensive version of one. A recovery service simply asks whether the files can be got back. A forensic investigation answers questions that someone may later need to defend: what was on this device, when, who put it there, what left the building and by what route. The price quoted for a forensic investigation covers both the analysis and the written report, which states how the examination was conducted, numbers the exhibits, separates findings from opinion, and is prepared so that it can go in front of a solicitor, a tribunal or a regulator without needing translation.
You commission this deliberately, as a result of an employment dispute, suspected theft of company information, a breakdown in a business partnership, or a matter that is heading to court. It will not happen just because you had a bad week. If you are a company trying to recover from an encryption run, crashed RAID drive(s) or a dropped laptop, then what you are buying is a recovery, and the bill should reflect that.
Name the tactics and they become easy to spot. A from-£49 headline that increases once an assessment has taken place. An assessment charge you pay regardless of whether a single file is returned. A standard turnaround set so slow that it is self-explanatory why someone would pay extra for the express tier. And success defined loosely enough that one openable file out of ten thousand would justify the total cost of the invoice.
Four questions cut through all of it. If you turn the quote down, is the diagnostic still free, and will your device be returned to you? Can their quoted price vary? How will they decide whether the recovery was successful, and do you get to review your recovered files before payment is made? And is the work going to be done by them, or passed on to someone else? Here are our answers in writing, in the same order. The cost of return postage is the only charge for turning it down. Once a price is agreed upon it will remain as such. Success means the files you asked for, located, opened and verified rather than counted. And every job is worked at our location at Guildford Business Park, where your parcel will arrive directly from you, not via a front office that sends it onward.
The cost of recovery can be reduced much further by good habits than by haggling. Switch it off quickly: a drive is as inexpensive as that job is ever going to get if it is turned off as soon as you hear the first strange noise. After a fortnight of hopeful retries, the same drive has become both a harder job and a less complete one. The less you fiddle with recovery software, the better: an overnight scan across tired hardware uses up read operations the paid recovery will need, and some of those free programs also write to the disk while the progress bar tells you nothing is being changed. Once you have a quote, either by telephone or via our free online diagnostic, we recommend posting the drive to us rather than leaving it lying around, or dropping it off at the Guildford lab Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment required. Tracked, insured postage costs a few pounds, there are no collection charges because nothing is collected, and parcels sent from Bracknell arrive at the Guildford bench the very next working day.
A note for students and researchers, as these parcels arrive in waves that match the submission dates. Reading, Royal Holloway and the colleges out towards Camberley and Sandhurst send the same job over and over: three years of work stored in one place, on a portable drive of a certain age that has been knocked at least once. The cheapest insurance ever devised is to hold a duplicate copy on something which is not connected to the first thing. If it has already stopped working, begin with the free diagnostic, or read whichever hardware page matches your device: hard drives, SSDs, external drives, memory cards, RAID, NAS and CCTV and DVR.
Read a price list in reverse order to test it. Ask yourself what happens when the answer is no, whether that is declining the quote or the recovery failing. If the diagnostic was free, the figure was fixed, and a logical job that produces nothing produced nothing as far as billing is concerned, then there's little doubt about the number at the top being correct. If any of these three has a condition attached, the headline number was never going to represent the true price.
Free diagnostic completed within 2 working days of booking in your device, then one fixed written quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Cards and USB sticks £250 + VAT, and any single drive or SSD £300 + VAT.