For one week at the start of July the reach from Temple Island to Poplar Point is measured in lengths rather than miles, and the rest of the year Henley goes back to being a Georgian market town with a bridge from 1786 and beech woods on the hills behind it. It is also, per head, one of the most thoroughly Apple-equipped towns in the Thames Valley.
Media sent in from Henley-on-Thames 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.
More MacBook and iMac work comes out of RG9 than out of anywhere comparable, which fits the town: agencies, film and video people, architects, writers, consultants and a media trade that follows the river up from the capital. The recurring job is a MacBook Pro that will not get past the loading bar with a client project on it, or an iMac that has slowed to a crawl because half of a Fusion Drive has failed. Apple storage is worth understanding before you plan anything. On older machines the drive lifts out and is recovered like any other at £300 + VAT. On recent Apple silicon and T2 machines the storage is soldered to the logic board and tied to that machine's secure enclave, and once that has failed there is no honest recovery to offer.
The second Henley speciality is external. Editors and photographers here work off portable drives and small desktop arrays because project files are enormous, and those drives live in bags, cars and boats. A Thunderbolt or USB drive that has been knocked while running is a mechanical case, not a software one, and the correct response is to unplug it and stop rather than to run a repair utility over it. Time Machine backups fail the same way and at the worst possible moment, since the backup disc has usually sat on the same desk, on the same extension lead, doing the same hours as the machine it was protecting.
The regatta and the festival that follows it generate their own fortnight of media every year: photography from the enclosures and the bank, video from launches, audio from the floating stage. Card failures peak in the days afterwards, and the answer is the same as it always is with flash, which is to stop using the card the moment it misbehaves. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT and are imaged before anything is read out of them, so the original is never written to.
Beyond the river the parish is rural. Remenham, Hambleden, Fawley, Shiplake, Wargrave and the villages up towards Nettlebed send farm office machines, small hotel and pub systems, and household drives holding decades of photographs. The rowing clubs and the museum at Mill Meadows add archive and video material. It is a small postcode producing a wide range of media, which is one reason a published price list matters more here than an hourly quote.
Everything comes in by post and nothing is collected. Take the drive out of the machine where it can be taken out, pack it so it cannot move, and send it tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, arriving the next working day from Henley. Your own courier is fine at your own cost. Diagnosis is free, finishes 2 working days after arrival and produces one fixed written figure: £300 + VAT for a drive or SSD, £250 + VAT for a card or pen drive, from £500 + VAT for an array or NAS, £400 + VAT for CCTV or BitLocker, £800 + VAT for a forensic investigation with a report. Logical faults are no fix, no fee. Mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level work, and water or fire damage, take 50% up front with the balance only on success. 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.