Saxon kings were crowned on a lump of sandstone that now sits railed off outside the Guildhall, and a few hundred yards away a dozen red telephone boxes lie toppled against each other as a piece of public sculpture. Kingston is a town of students, film crews and river traffic, which between them shoot an enormous quantity of footage onto very small pieces of plastic.
Media sent in from Kingston upon 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.
SD card recovery is the job this postcode generates more than any other. The art school at Knights Park, the film and media courses, the freelance shooters who settled here for the river and the fast line into Waterloo, and the wedding and event photographers working Hampton Court and the Kingston hotels all run the same risk. A card is a single copy until the moment it is offloaded, and the offload is the moment things go wrong: a reader pulled mid-transfer, a card that reports itself as unformatted on the way home, a camera that wrote a corrupt directory after a battery died in the cold.
One instruction covers all of it. Stop using the card immediately. Do not shoot another frame on it, do not let the camera format it and offer to start again, and do not run a free recovery app that writes its own files back onto the card while it works. Every card is imaged first, and the frames are rebuilt from that image, so the card you send is never written to. Raw files and video clips are opened where the codec allows before they go back, so what you receive is confirmed to play rather than just listed. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT.
Beyond the cards, KT1 and KT2 behave like a busy town centre. The Bentall Centre and the market place send tills and back-office machines. Riverside restaurants and the hotels along the Portsmouth Road send booking systems. Design studios, architects and small agencies in Canbury and Norbiton send project drives, and the streets around Surbiton and Coombe send household externals holding everything a family has. Student laptops arrive in a wave from February to May, usually with a dissertation on them and no copy anywhere else, which is a lesson learned the hard way rather than the easy one.
There is no shop in Kingston and no counter anywhere in London. What there is instead is the A3, and the bench sits at the far end of it in Guildford. Post the card in a padded envelope with the card taped inside folded stiff card so it cannot bend or slip out, or box a bare drive so it cannot move, and send it tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. From Kingston that is next working day. Nothing is collected, from here or from anywhere else, though your own courier is welcome at your cost.
The diagnostic costs nothing and finishes 2 working days after the parcel arrives, at which point you are told what proportion is likely to come back and given one fixed written figure. Memory cards and USB pen drives £250 + VAT. Any single drive or SSD, NVMe included, £300 + VAT. NAS, RAID and servers from £500 + VAT depending on the disc count. CCTV or DVR £400 + VAT. BitLocker £400 + VAT. Forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. Logical faults, which is most card work, run under no fix, no fee. Physical, mechanical, electronic, board-level, water and fire damage take 50% of the quote before the work 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.