Recovery for every London postcode, worked at the Guildford bench rather than in a shop with a rented counter. Your media travels down the A3 by courier or tracked post, the diagnostic costs nothing, and one hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT wherever it was sent from. There is no London office, and the lack of one is why the figure is what it is.
London prices are the same prices. One drive or SSD £300 + VAT, cards £250 + VAT, arrays from £500 + VAT — free diagnostic first, one written figure second, and no London mark-up on either.
London work arrives in volume and it arrives in patterns. These six cover most of it, and every one of them is priced from the same published bands as a job from the next street to the lab.
Agency file servers, virtual machine datastores and the box that holds every job the studio has ever run. Parity sets and stripes alike are imaged member by member and reassembled in software. From £500 + VAT, priced by disc count.
Synology, QNAP and Netgear units in cupboards behind reception, usually noticed when a share stops appearing rather than when the first disc failed. Both or all the discs travel together, and the layout is rebuilt from the images.
SD, microSD, CompactFlash and CFexpress out of cameras and drones, reporting themselves blank or asking to be formatted. Flash work at £250 + VAT, and where the controller has stopped answering the memory is read directly.
iMac, Mac mini and MacBook storage, provided it unbolts. £300 + VAT for a drive or a blade, Fusion pairs quoted as pairs. Flash soldered to an Apple Silicon logic board is the one thing nobody can recover, and this site says so.
The commonest London parcel of all. Externals that beep, click or stop being recognised, most of them holding the only copy of a project. £300 + VAT, and the diagnostic settles whether it is the case or the drive.
Hard disk repair is the phrase, and the honest translation is that the drive is stabilised only long enough to copy it. Nothing is handed back mended and nobody should trust the failed unit again. The data is what comes home, on fresh media.
Each district has a page of its own with local detail and the service that postcode sends most. The list runs from Croydon and Bromley in the south-east, across Sutton and Wimbledon, up the A3 through Kingston, Richmond and Twickenham, then west to Hounslow, Ealing and Hammersmith. Anywhere not named sits with whichever of these is closest, and the price is identical either way.
CR0 and CR2. Office servers and RAID sets from the tower blocks around East Croydon, and household drives from the streets behind them. Arrays from £500 + VAT.
BR1 and BR2. A great deal of small-business NAS work, much of it two-bay boxes bought as a backup and treated as one until the day both discs stopped.
KT1 and KT2, straight up the A3 from the lab. Cards and USB sticks at £250 + VAT dominate here, alongside student and household laptops.
SW19. Mac and PC work in roughly equal measure, from home offices and small consultancies. Any single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT.
TW9 and TW10. Portable drives and SSDs out of media and design work, the sort that live in a bag and eventually take a knock they do not recover from.
W5 and W13. Production and post-production storage, project arrays and scratch volumes built for speed rather than safety, from £500 + VAT by disc count.
TW3 to TW5 and Heathrow. Freight, logistics and airport-adjacent firms whose servers hold the paperwork that has to be produced on demand.
SM1 and SM2. Encrypted business laptops are common, and a BitLocker volume is £400 + VAT where the recovery key can be produced or the account traced.
TW1 and TW2. SSD and NVMe work above all — blades that stopped enumerating overnight in machines that gave no warning at all.
W6. Agency and studio project arrays, plus the external drives that carry a job between an office and somebody's flat and fail in transit.
Start with the thing most firms in this trade leave vague. This lab has no premises in London. The bench is at Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, and every London job gets there the same way: tracked, insured post, or a courier you book yourself. Nothing is collected, there is no counter in town to walk into, and no engineer comes to your office. If a page elsewhere implies a London laboratory behind a London address, it is worth asking which building the clean bench is actually in.
What that model buys you is straightforward. The A3 runs from Wandsworth out through the Kingston bypass and Esher and lands in Guildford, so a same-day courier booked in central London reaches the bench inside the working day, and often inside the morning. Tracked post from any London postcode is normally there the next working day. Guildford is around forty minutes from Waterloo by train if you would rather bring it yourself, and reception takes devices over the counter Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. A drive that leaves Hammersmith at lunchtime can be booked in the same afternoon, which is quicker than most people manage to cross London carrying one.
The second advantage is the price. One hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT here, whoever sent it and from wherever. That figure is published, it is the same for a household in Sutton and an agency in Soho, and it does not carry the cost of a central-London shopfront. Multi-disc work opens at £500 + VAT counted by disc; cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. Nobody is quoted more because the job sounds urgent or because the postcode looks expensive.
It is also worth knowing what usually happens to a drive handed over a counter in town. Most high-street computer shops do not own a clean-air bench, a set of head combs, a shelf of donor drives or firmware-level tooling, because none of that is worth owning unless recovery is all you do. So the shop posts it to a laboratory, waits, and adds a margin to whatever comes back. You are welcome to skip that step, and the money and the week that go with it.
It is a fair question and it deserves a practical answer rather than a boast. Four things are worth checking before anybody gets your drive. Does the firm publish its prices, or does the figure only appear after you have described how much you need the data? Is there a written quote before work starts, and does the invoice match it? What exactly does no fix, no fee cover — here it covers logical recoveries and not electronic or mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs or forensic jobs, which take 50% upfront. And does the firm do the work itself, or forward it? Those four questions will tell you more than any badge on a homepage, and they are the reason this site puts its figures on a public page.
Multi-disc work is the largest category of London enquiry by a distance, and it is worth understanding why the answer is never a quick one. Every member is imaged individually before anything is reassembled, because a set that is already short of redundancy cannot safely be asked to rebuild itself. The layout is then proved from those images — member order, block size, parity rotation, start offset — and the volume is raised in software with the originals untouched on a shelf. The level-by-level detail sits on RAID 5, RAID 1 and RAID 0, with RAID recovery and NAS recovery covering the rest and SAN recovery covering LUNs and VMFS datastores.
What to do before it is boxed is short and it matters. Power the unit down and leave it down. Do not authorise a rebuild and do not accept a menu offering to initialise or repair the array. Label each disc with the bay it came from, keep the set together including any member already declared dead, and note the make and model of the controller or the NAS. Then book a courier or post it tracked. A set can be moved up the bench queue where a business is stopped, and saying so when you ring is what makes that possible.
London fills more cards than anywhere else in the country, and cards are the least protected storage anybody owns. A card that mounts and shows nothing, or that asks to be formatted, has usually lost its directory rather than its contents. The important instruction is the dull one: stop using it. Do not carry on shooting to the same card, do not let software write a repair to it, and do not accept the format offer. Send it as it is and the work is £250 + VAT, with the memory read directly where the controller has stopped responding. More detail is on memory card recovery and USB stick recovery.
Mac queries are a large share of the London demand and they need a clear line drawn through them. Where the storage comes out — iMac and Mac mini up to roughly 2020, MacBooks with a 2.5-inch disc, and the plug-in blade modules from about 2010 to 2017 — it is ordinary work at £300 + VAT, with Fusion pairs quoted as pairs. Where the flash is soldered to the logic board and encrypted by it, which is every Apple Silicon machine and every T2 model, there is nothing to remove and nothing anyone can read. The Apple Mac guide sets out the model years, FileVault and what to do about the recovery key, with MacBook and iMac pages behind it.
Portable drives are the single commonest parcel from London: bags, bikes, desks and the floor account for most of them. A drive that beeps is a motor or a head problem and no cable will change it; a drive that shows no light at all is often a dead enclosure with a healthy disc inside. Both are diagnosed free before a figure is named. Solid state and NVMe blades fail differently and more suddenly, and TRIM means genuinely deleted data on a healthy SSD is usually gone for good, which is a limit worth stating rather than dancing around. See external drive recovery, SSD recovery, NVMe recovery and LaCie recovery.
On repair, the honest translation is worth repeating. A drive that has failed mechanically is given donor heads, a donor motor base or a board carrying its own firmware for exactly one purpose: to keep it readable long enough to copy every sector off it. It is not handed back mended and nobody here would suggest trusting it again. Your data comes home on fresh media, and the original is returned or securely destroyed exactly as you instruct in writing.
Take the storage out of the machine first — laptops, towers, iMacs and recorders all have to be opened by somebody, and a repair shop will do it for a few pounds. Pack the bare unit so it cannot move in the box, leave the cable and the power brick at home, and put your name, a mobile number and two lines about what happened in with it. Send it Special Delivery, or book a courier of your own; a same-day service from central London reaches Guildford inside the working day. Anything soldered to a mainboard cannot be sent, because there is nothing to send. The free diagnostic can be run online while the parcel is in transit, and the county service across the border is on data recovery Berkshire.
Book a courier or send it tracked. Diagnosis is free, the figure is fixed, and nothing starts until you approve 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.