A freephone line and a single mailbox, both answered by the people who do the recoveries. Describe the device and what it started doing, and the same working day you will have a view on what is likely to come back, which band the job sits in, and how to get the media onto the Guildford bench without adding to the damage. 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
Asking is free and binds you to nothing. The first time money comes up is when a written figure is in front of you and you have agreed to it.
Four boxes and an engineer rings you. Put the hardware and the symptom in the last one and leave the formalities out of it.
An engineer rings before the working day is out (Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm). If it genuinely will not keep, the freephone line is quicker: 0800 689 0668.
Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Free from mobiles and landlines alike, and answered by people whose whole week is failed storage.
Guildford Data Recovery
Building 2, Ground Floorwww.guildforddatarecovery.co.uk
Put Guildford Data Recovery on the label and drop your name and mobile number inside the box. Two routes get it there: tracked and insured post, or a courier you book yourself. Reception also takes devices across the counter, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, and Bracknell to that door is about forty minutes down the A322 and the A3. What does not exist is a Bracknell shopfront or a van heading your way.
Still screwed into a laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, server or recorder? The drive has to come out first and travel on its own. Nothing is dismantled at this bench, and flash soldered directly to a mainboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a few ultraslim laptops, cannot be lifted off at all.
Rather put it in writing? support@guildforddatarecovery.co.uk is where both forms on this site deliver. Engineers read it; no marketing department sits in between.
Two PDFs travel with the parcel. Complete the first, lay it over the packing, and a job number goes onto your device within minutes of reception opening the box.
↓ Booking-in and shipping sheet (PDF)
↓ Terms and conditions (PDF)
Two minutes on the free online diagnostic returns a read-out: hardware, badge, symptom, then the fault it usually proves to be, the one thing to do right now, and the band it lands in — all while the device is still on your desk.
Trading stopped by a server, a RAID or a NAS? Say so on the telephone. The job gets flagged before the box arrives and its examination moves up the bench queue. What does not change is the band: £300 + VAT for a single drive or SSD, arrays from £500 + VAT.
Nothing here is meant to be opaque. This is every stage a job passes through, in sequence, and the two stages where the call is entirely yours are flagged as such.
Telephone, form or email, whichever suits. Three things are wanted: the device, the symptom, and roughly when it started. A couple of sentences is plenty.
Same working day. You are told what the fault probably is, which band the job sits in, and whether the postage is worth spending at all.
Drive or card alone, boxed tightly enough that nothing rattles, with the completed booking-in sheet inside and a tracked, insured service paid for. Leads and caddies stay with you.
Reception opens the parcel, puts a job number against it and messages you to say it landed. From there the media lives in the lab rather than on somebody's desk.
Two working days after arrival, and no sooner. Electronics, mechanics, firmware, media condition and file system are each judged, and one fixed figure comes out of it.
Say yes and the recovery starts. Say no and the media is posted back. Getting to that point costs nothing, and the figure does not move once you have agreed it.
Two questions set the figure, and only two: what class of media is it, and what has broken inside it. Urgency in your voice moves nothing. Neither does the worth of what is on the disk, which is the oldest trick in this trade and one nobody here plays.
Five figures, and that is the whole list. The third one does three jobs rather than splitting into three, which is why a report-free forensic image costs the same as a recorder disk instead of opening a band of its own. Nothing else is charged for, no extra tier appears halfway through a job, and the band your media falls into is settled by what it is rather than by how the week has gone.
Ransomware is the one people assume will be different, and it is not. The band follows the hardware rather than the panic: £300 + VAT where the encrypted data sits on one drive, from £500 + VAT where it sits on a server, NAS or array. No ransom is paid on anybody's behalf, ever.
VAT goes on top of each line and appears as its own entry on the quote instead of being folded in. Carriage is whatever you buy in each direction, and the encrypted media your files travel home on costs nothing extra.
Then there is the question of who carries the risk. No fix, no fee applies to logical recoveries: files deleted, a volume formatted, a file system in pieces, or entirely healthy hardware the machine refuses to acknowledge. Nothing recovered on one of those means nothing invoiced. The published exclusions are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. Physical work is 50% upfront, because donor parts get bought and clean-bench hours get spent regardless of how the platters behave; the balance falls due only when your files are back in your hands. Whichever footing applies is printed on the quote you read, and the data recovery cost page works through what sits behind each band.
Nearly every job here arrived as a parcel. Tracked, insured post is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and something handed over in Berkshire, Surrey or London is normally on the Guildford bench the next working day.
Is the storage still bolted into a machine — laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, rack server, a DVR under the till? Free it first and send the bare unit. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, though it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop on your high street. There is a single case with no way round it: memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon machines and certain ultrabooks are built. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
The name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell is roughly forty minutes on the A322 then the A3; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as it is logged onto the system, and two working days later the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure whether something should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 while the lid is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it tell you.
Run the wizard. Two minutes, no details wanted until the end, and a read-out that tells you whether posting it is worth your time.