Brunel put two of the flattest brick arches ever built across the Thames at Maidenhead in 1838 and was told they would fall down. They are still there, and if you stand under the towpath side and clap, the echo comes back twice. The town has spent the years since being competent and understated about a great many things, including how much of its business now sits on encrypted company laptops.
Media sent in from Maidenhead 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.
The Elizabeth line changed the shape of SL6 more than anything since the railway itself arrived. Offices that would once have been in the capital took space around the town centre and along the A4 instead, and the population that fills them commutes in the other direction. That mix produces a very particular parcel: a corporate laptop with an NVMe drive, full disk encryption switched on by policy, and a user who is the only person who ever touched the machine. BitLocker recovery is £400 + VAT and it is far quicker when you can supply the recovery key, or the details of the account the key is escrowed to, so ask IT for that before the drive is posted.
The consultancies and small headquarters around Braywick and the Vicus Way side of town send the other half. Financial models, client deliverables, CAD sets, a shared project folder on a machine somebody once described as the server and nobody has patched since. What gets lost is almost never everything at once. It is the two directories that mattered, on the one drive that was not in the backup scope because it was added after the backup was set up.
Beyond the ring road the character changes completely. Bray is a mile downstream, the two restaurants there have made the village internationally known, and the hospitality trade around them runs bookings, rotas and till systems on small machines in back offices that flood-risk maps do not flatter. Boulter's Lock and Ray Mill Island bring the boating and photography work in summer. Cox Green, Furze Platt, Pinkneys Green and Holyport send the household drives, and White Waltham airfield adds a handful of flight video and instrument recordings every year.
Everything arrives by post. The drive comes out of the laptop or tower before it travels, since only bare media is worked on here, and it goes into a box padded well enough that nothing shifts. Tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, which from Maidenhead is next working day. Booking your own courier is fine, at your cost. What does not exist anywhere on this network is a collection service, and there is no shop in Maidenhead to hand anything over at.
Nothing is charged to establish what has gone wrong. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after the parcel lands and produces one fixed written figure with the odds stated plainly. Any one hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. NAS, RAID and server work starts at £500 + VAT and increases with the disc count. CCTV and DVR jobs are £400 + VAT, as is a BitLocker volume, and a forensic investigation with a written report is £800 + VAT. Logical faults carry no fix, no fee. Physical work, meaning mechanical, electronic, board-level or chip-level repair and anything damaged by water or fire, takes 50% of the quote up front with the balance 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.