Hard drives, SSDs, NVMe, RAID sets, NAS boxes and memory cards, recovered for Bracknell, Berkshire and London through the post.
A desktop drive that has started ticking instead of spinning up. An NVMe module the BIOS has quietly stopped listing. A four-bay NAS that lost its second disk during a rebuild, on the morning everybody needed it. A card back from a weekend shoot reporting itself empty. Not one of those is an unusual arrival here, and not many of them turn out to be the end of the matter. Working out what is still readable costs you nothing at all, and if there is a job worth doing the figure is written down before anybody opens anything.
Almost every Bracknell job takes the same shape. The media travels to the Guildford bench, you are told what can be read back and what it would come to, and then you decide in your own time. Being told is never the part you pay for.
Nothing is charged to find out, and the figure that follows is final. Each band is published here rather than held back until you ring: £250 + VAT a card or stick, £300 + VAT a drive or SSD, from £500 + VAT an array. All of them are set out on the data recovery cost page.
A snapped pen drive gets the same bench, and the same pair of hands, as a twenty-disk SAN. Nothing at all is quoted until somebody has looked at it; after that, one service covers the lot — files deleted by accident, volumes that have turned corrupt, drives dropped down a stairwell, boards that took a surge off the mains, platters that will no longer turn. Pick a device from the grid, or ring and describe it in whatever words come to hand: the person who answers has been reading these faults since storage was measured in megabytes, and is not working from a script.
When a computer quietly stops listing a drive, that drive is normally still holding…
Solid state drives stop without a sound, and owners find that harder to accept than any…
No other component in a computer stops this abruptly. There is no rattle beforehand and…
A great deal gets photographed around this corner of Berkshire and very little of it…
A finished dissertation, a month of payroll, the last remaining copy of the books, and…
What makes these jobs painful is the timing. The machine gives up on the morning a…
For most households the tower under the desk holds every photograph the family owns,…
Grey screen, and nothing after it. Or a question mark folder flashing away in the…
A MacBook rarely makes a fuss on the way out. It stops accepting the charger, or the…
It is invariably the drive carrying the only copy that gets knocked onto the floor.…
The unit humming quietly on a shelf turns out to have been holding the company accounts…
The cameras did their part. Then the recorder failed, or the loop came round and…
Nobody had looked at the alert panel for months, so the first failure went unnoticed,…
The awkward thing about shared storage is that when it fails, everything sitting on top…
Monday morning and nothing will open. Every filename has picked up a suffix nobody…
A blue screen asking for forty-eight digits, and no record kept anywhere of what those…
A laptop comes back in noticeably better order than it went out in, whoever handed it…
Ring 0800 689 0668, or fill in the diagnostic form and let it ask the questions. Describe it however you would to a neighbour; no vocabulary test is being set.
Tracked, insured post from a Berkshire, Surrey or London address is on the bench the next working day. Roughly forty minutes by road on the A322 and the A3 if you would sooner hand it in. Nobody collects.
Once it is booked in, the clock is 2 working days. What has failed, an honest read on the odds, and one price that will not move.
Approve the figure and everything recovered travels back on an encrypted drive, typically 2 to 4 working days on a single disk.
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.
"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, and the whole tech corridor running along the M4 from Reading through to Slough. Keep going past the M25 and the same bench serves ten London districts as well: Croydon, Bromley, Sutton, Kingston upon Thames, Wimbledon, Richmond, Twickenham, Hounslow, Ealing and Hammersmith. Because every job moves by tracked next-day post, a parcel handed in at Sandhurst is treated no differently from one posted in Hammersmith, and a firm whose server has stopped begins the job at a post office five minutes away instead of losing half a day to the M25. If an entire office has gone down, the blog sets out plainly what a disaster recovery plan has to account for. The home patch is listed town by town on the data recovery Berkshire page, and the capital has a hub of its own at data recovery London.
Across the M25, where a tracked parcel usually beats carrying a drive across town to a shop that would only post it to a lab:
The diagnosis costs nothing, the quote is one written number, and a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT.