Real figures, published, for Bracknell and for anywhere else with a post office in it. Five figures cover nearly everything that reaches this bench, and the one against your job is put in writing as soon as an engineer has examined the hardware. VAT is added and shown separately.
Nobody pays to find out. Not for the wizard here and not for the engineer's examination in Guildford. The only invoice that ever lands is one you read and approved first.
Two things decide the band and neither of them is you. What the media is, and what has physically gone wrong inside it. How worried the caller sounds has never once altered a figure, and neither has what the files happen to be worth to their owner. Add VAT to everything below.
SD, microSD, CompactFlash, CFexpress and the pen drive on somebody's keyring. Where the controller has stopped answering the reader, the memory itself is read directly instead.
Spinning or solid state, 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch, M.2 or NVMe. The machine it came out of never changes the figure, so a tower disc, a laptop SSD and a drive lifted from an external case are all this band.
RAID sets, NAS boxes, servers and SAN volumes. Each member earns an image of its own before a single stripe is put back together, so the number of discs is what moves the total.
The disc out of a recorder, with whichever hours of footage you actually need exported and documented so that somebody outside the building can follow it.
Getting into a BitLocker drive that is otherwise sound, where the recovery key can be produced or the account it belongs to can be traced.
Casework written up in a report meant to survive being argued with. Drop the report and the forensic image with deleted-file extraction stands at £400 + VAT.
Put simply: one hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT with NVMe counted alongside; a memory card or USB stick is £250 + VAT; anything holding more than one disc, whether that is a RAID set, a NAS box or a SAN, opens at £500 + VAT. Recorder discs and BitLocker unlocks are £400 + VAT each, and forensic casework with a report is £800 + VAT. Your own figure comes out of a free diagnostic.
Answer these in order and you will land on your own band before anybody at the lab has touched the media.
Notice what is missing from all three. Nobody here asks what the files are worth to you, and nobody asks how badly you want them back. A trade with a reputation for reading the customer before naming a price is a trade that ought to publish its prices, which is the entire reason this page exists rather than a contact form.
Files encrypted by ransomware are priced as ordinary media. A single drive is £300 + VAT and a server or array is from £500 + VAT, exactly as they would be for any other fault. It is not a forensic instruction, it is not £800 + VAT, and no ransom is ever handled or paid on your behalf. The route is snapshots, shadow copies, remnants and whatever the encryption run failed to finish. See ransomware recovery.
The diagnostic is free in both of the senses that matter. The wizard on this site costs nothing and asks for no card, and neither does the engineer's examination once the media has reached the bench, however many hours that examination runs to. What comes out of it is a single fixed figure, in writing. Agree it and the work starts. Decline it and the media is posted back. Neither answer produces an invoice.
No fix, no fee runs on logical work — deleted or formatted files, a corrupt file system, a partition that has vanished, a healthy drive the machine will no longer acknowledge. If your data cannot be brought back from one of those, there is nothing to pay.
The exclusions are stated plainly and they are the same across the network: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. Anything landing in that list is 50% upfront, with the balance due only once the files are proven back. That split is not a hedge. Donor drives, head and motor transplants, board repairs, chips lifted off a card and firmware-level surgery all cost real money and real bench hours before the first sector has been read, and a lab that pretended otherwise would simply price it into everybody else's job.
Forensic instructions are settled in full before they begin, because the deliverable is the examination and the report rather than a pile of recovered files. The standard investigation is £800 + VAT with its written report; where no report is wanted, the forensic image with deleted-file extraction is £400 + VAT.
All of that assumes the media has arrived. The bench is at Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH — about forty minutes from Bracknell down the A322 and the A3, or one working day in the post from any address in Berkshire, Surrey or London. Assessment closes 2 working days after your device is booked in, and a finished single-drive recovery runs 2 to 4 working days from your approval.
A quote here is not an hourly rate with parts added on at the end, so it is worth setting out exactly what one figure buys.
Only two items fall outside that list, and neither is large. Postage in is bought by you, since choosing the tracked and insured service is your decision rather than ours. VAT is added on top instead of being buried, so it appears on the quote as a separate line and the recovery fee stays visible beside it.
Absent from all of it is the collection of extras this trade has a name for. Looking is not billed. Nobody is charged more for sounding worried on the telephone. There is no arithmetic by the gigabyte, no fee for a report on an ordinary recovery, and no difference whatever between the figure quoted and the figure invoiced — which is the entire reason for putting it in writing at the start.
Four jobs off this bench, with the band each landed in and the terms that came with it. Yours will differ in the detail rather than the method: a figure, fixed, in writing, before anything is opened.
The drive was mechanically fine. A folder had been dragged somewhere nobody could find and then partly written over. Logical from end to end, so £300 + VAT with no fix, no fee intact — had it come back empty the invoice would have read nothing.
A member had dropped out in the spring and the warning email went to somebody who had left. The second disc gave up in October. All four were copied one at a time and the volume rebuilt from those copies, with the originals never written to: from £500 + VAT, the total set by how many discs there were.
A CFexpress card that mounted and showed nothing at all. Flash work, £250 + VAT, and among the quicker jobs in the queue — the directory had gone, the images had not, and both cards from the day came back complete.
Recorder jobs sit on the forensic footing whatever prompted them, so the £400 + VAT was paid before the work started. The relevant clips were exported with their timestamps and documented well enough for the insurer to accept them.
Free diagnosis first, one fixed figure second, and no work at all until you say yes to it.
Hardly anything walks into this lab; it arrives in a padded box. Tracked, insured post is the least stressful thing that can happen to storage that has already given up, and a parcel handed over at a Bracknell post office before the last collection is usually in Guildford the following 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.