Camberley exists because the army came to the sandy heath in 1812 and a town assembled itself around the gates. Two centuries later the defence connection has turned into an engineering economy stretched along the Blackwater Valley, and the drives that arrive from GU15 tend to carry drawings, test results and contracts that nobody is at liberty to discuss.
Media sent in from Camberley is diagnosed free. One written figure lands before any work starts: £300 + VAT a single drive or SSD, £250 + VAT a card or stick, arrays from £500 + VAT.
Confidentiality is the first question from most Camberley callers, and it is a fair one. Work is taken under a confidentiality agreement wherever your contract requires it. Recovered data is returned on fresh media rather than on the original device, and the original drive is then returned to you or securely destroyed, exactly as you instruct in writing, with nothing retained beyond the period you agree. If a failure has already become a reportable incident, say so at the start, because it changes what has to be preserved and how the job is documented.
The engineering work itself comes off the A331 corridor and the business parks around Watchmoor and Frimley. Precision machining, electronics, instrumentation, test houses and the design consultancies that feed the larger aerospace employers a few miles down the valley. What fails is usually a workstation that has been building simulations for six years, or a cupboard server holding drawing revisions and quality records going back to a contract that closed a decade ago and still has to be evidenced. Machine files and CAD assemblies are opened or rendered where possible before they go back, so what you receive is confirmed usable rather than simply present in a directory listing.
The town centre and the residential belt supply the balance. Traders around the Atrium and the Meadows, practices and agencies on the London Road, medical and dental surgeries in Frimley and Frimley Green, and households in Old Dean, Heatherside, York Town, Mytchett and Deepcut. A good proportion of those are the same story told twice a week: one external drive, bought years ago, holding every photograph the family owns, now clicking or refusing to mount, with no second copy anywhere.
Nothing is collected from any address, and there is no shop in Camberley. The drive has to come out of the machine and travel alone, padded so it cannot move, tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. That is next working day by post, and Camberley is close enough that plenty of people simply drive it down the A331 and the A31 instead. Reception at the lab takes drop-offs in office hours. Booking your own courier is fine and is your cost.
The diagnostic is free, closes 2 working days after arrival and produces one fixed figure in writing. Single hard drive or SSD, NVMe included, £300 + VAT. Card or USB pen drive £250 + VAT. RAID, NAS and server work from £500 + VAT, rising with the disc count. CCTV or DVR £400 + VAT. BitLocker £400 + VAT. Forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. Logical faults come under no fix, no fee. Physical work, whether mechanical, electronic, board-level or chip-level, and anything damaged by water or fire, takes 50% of the quoted price before the work with the remainder charged only if the data comes back. Freephone 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
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.
Nothing to pay for the diagnosis, £300 + VAT for a single drive or SSD, and £250 + VAT for a card or stick.