Reading built itself on beer, bulbs and biscuits, and then quietly swapped all three for software. The Huntley and Palmers works have gone, the Kennet still runs under the Oracle centre, and the town now holds one of the densest concentrations of technology payroll outside the capital. Almost none of it is backed up as well as the people running it believe.
Media sent in from Reading 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.
Thames Valley Park sits on the east side where the Kennet meets the Thames, Green Park sits south of junction 11, and between them they generate the most technical calls on this list. Developer workstations with two or three NVMe drives and a working copy of something that was never pushed. Build servers. Virtual machine images on a single SSD because the host was only ever meant to be temporary. Flash gives no warning at all, which is the part people find hardest: there is no clicking, no slow decline, just a drive that was in the boot menu on Friday and is not enumerated on Monday. An NVMe is quoted at the same £300 + VAT as a spinning disk.
The university at Whiteknights adds a seasonal layer to it. From February onwards the calls change character: a laptop that will not start with a thesis on it, a portable drive carrying three years of interview recordings, a shared external holding a whole research group's field data. Ethics-bound material is handled under a confidentiality agreement where you need one, recovered data comes back on fresh media, and the original drive is returned or securely destroyed exactly as you instruct in writing.
Then there is the rest of RG1 to RG6, which is an ordinary large town and behaves like one. Traders in the Oracle and along Broad Street with tills and back-office machines. Practices and agencies in the offices behind the station and around Forbury Gardens. Households in Caversham, Tilehurst, Woodley and Earley with one external drive holding everything since the children were small. Every August the festival ground at Little John's Farm produces its own small run of camera cards and audio recorders that stopped writing halfway through a set.
Nothing is collected, from Reading or from anywhere else on this network, so the drive has to travel. Take it out of the machine, pad it so it cannot move inside the box, and post it tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. That is next working day from any Reading post office. A courier you book and pay for yourself does the same job and changes nothing about how the parcel is handled when it arrives.
The diagnostic is free and completes 2 working days after arrival, which is the honest figure rather than a sales one. You get one fixed written price at the end of it. Single drive, SSD or NVMe £300 + VAT. Card or pen drive £250 + VAT. RAID, NAS and servers from £500 + VAT, rising with the disc count. CCTV or DVR £400 + VAT. BitLocker £400 + VAT. Forensic investigation with a report £800 + VAT. No fix, no fee applies to logical faults, meaning deleted work, a corrupt file system or a partition that has vanished. Physical, mechanical, electronic and board-level jobs, plus water and fire damage, take 50% up front with the balance only on success. Ring 0800 689 0668 free, 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.