The view from Richmond Hill is protected by its own Act of Parliament, which is a level of care nobody extends to the small black box on the desk holding every photograph they have ever taken. Between the park, the towpath and the gardens at Kew, TW9 and TW10 photograph themselves more than most places, and store the results in exactly one place.
Media sent in from Richmond 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.
External drive recovery is the standing job here. A portable USB drive is the default answer to a full laptop, and in Richmond it tends to hold a freelance career: design work, manuscripts, edit projects, thousands of raw files from the park at dawn and the river in the evening. The drive is carried in a bag, plugged into a laptop on a kitchen table, unplugged in a hurry, and eventually dropped. It is worth being clear about what dropping one does. Inside a portable drive the heads fly a fraction above a spinning platter, and an impact while running puts them onto the surface, which is mechanical damage rather than a software problem.
The symptoms tell you which kind of trouble you have. A drive that beeps, ticks or spins up and stops repeatedly is a physical case, and the correct response is to unplug it and stop, because every further attempt takes more surface away. A drive that mounts but asks to be formatted, or shows an empty folder where the files were, is usually a broken file system with everything still intact behind it. A drive that shows no sign of life at all is often just the little bridge board in the plastic case rather than the disc, which is one of the better outcomes and a routine job on the bench.
Beyond the freelancers, the borough sends a wide spread. Restaurants and hotels around the Green and along the riverside with booking systems and tills. Small practices and agencies in the streets off George Street and up Hill Rise. Studios and horticultural, conservation and research offices out towards Kew with image and dataset archives. Households in Petersham, Ham, North Sheen and Mortlake with the family archive on one disc. And, every year, a run of camera cards from people who spent a morning photographing the deer and never copied them off.
Nothing is collected and there is no London premises to visit. The parcel is the whole of it: the drive out of its case or out of the machine if it comes apart easily, or the complete unit if it does not, packed so it cannot shift, sent tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. From Richmond that arrives the next working day. Keep the power supply and the cable at home, since neither is any use at this end, and use your own courier instead if that suits you better.
Establishing the fault costs nothing and takes 2 working days from the moment the parcel lands, after which you get one fixed figure in writing. Any single drive or SSD, external or internal, is £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. NAS boxes and arrays start at £500 + VAT and rise with the disc count. CCTV or DVR recovery is £400 + VAT, BitLocker £400 + VAT, and forensic work with a report £800 + VAT. No fix, no fee covers logical faults only. Mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level work, and anything damaged by water or fire, takes 50% of the quote up front with the remainder due only if the data returns. 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.