For a fortnight each summer SW19 is a global address and for the other fifty weeks it is two places: the Village up on the hill by the Common, and the town down at the bottom by the station. Both are full of people whose work lives on a Mac, and Mac failures have their own rules that catch out anyone expecting a Windows machine.
Media sent in from Wimbledon 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.
Apple recovery is the recurring theme here, and the first thing worth knowing is that the model decides everything. Machines with a removable drive give up their data like any other computer, and a drive lifted out of an older iMac or MacBook is quoted at the same £300 + VAT as anything else. Machines built around Apple silicon or a T2 chip keep their storage soldered to the logic board and encrypted against a key held inside that specific chip, which means that when the board dies the data goes with it. That is an uncomfortable answer and it is given straight away rather than after a bill, so ring 0800 689 0668 with the model and the year before you post anything.
The second Apple complication is FileVault. Turned on by default on many machines and by policy on most work Macs, it encrypts the whole volume, and a recovered image of an encrypted disc is useless without the password or the recovery key. If the drive belongs to somebody who has gone, find out whether the key was escrowed to an Apple account or held by an employer before the media travels. When the credentials exist the recovery proceeds normally. When they do not, no amount of bench time changes the answer, and you will be told so at the free diagnostic.
SW19 sends more than laptops. The Village and the streets off Ridgway hold consultancies, media people and a large number of home studios, so Thunderbolt arrays and desktop drives holding edit libraries turn up regularly, along with the external that was serving as the backup and quietly stopped working months before anybody checked. Down the hill, the shops around Centre Court and the Broadway send tills and camera systems, the theatre and the small production companies send video, and the residential streets towards Raynes Park and South Wimbledon send household drives full of pictures.
The lab is in Guildford, not in Wimbledon and not anywhere in London, and pretending otherwise would only waste a journey. Everything arrives by tracked, insured post, which from SW19 is next working day, and that is faster in practice than handing a drive to a London shop that will send it to a lab like this one and add days at both ends. Take the drive out of the machine, pad it so it cannot move, and address the parcel to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. There is no collection service; a courier you book yourself is fine.
Diagnosis is free and closes 2 working days after arrival, ending in one written figure that does not move. Any single hard drive or SSD, NVMe included, is £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. Arrays, NAS boxes and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the disc count. CCTV and DVR work is £400 + VAT, BitLocker £400 + VAT, and a forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. Logical faults are covered by no fix, no fee. Physical work, meaning mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level repair, along with water and fire damage, takes 50% of the quoted price before the job with the balance charged only if the files come 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.