The Long Walk runs three miles dead straight from the castle to the Copper Horse, and on a clear day half the people on it are photographing the other half. Windsor is worked by cameras more intensively than almost any town in the country, and a memory card that fills up on a Saturday in a hotel, a marquee or a paddock is a small local industry in its own right.
Media sent in from Windsor 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.
Photographers are the largest single group posting media in from SL4. Weddings at the guildhall and in the hotels along the river, portrait sessions in the Great Park, corporate work in the marquees, race evenings at the course, and the sheer volume of visitor and press work that a castle generates. The parcel that arrives is a card that asked to be formatted on the drive home, or a portable SSD holding a day's shoot that was never copied off. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT and a portable SSD is £300 + VAT.
There is one rule for a card that has misbehaved and it is short. Stop using it. Do not shoot another frame, do not let the camera format it, and do not point a free recovery utility at it and let the utility write anything back to it. The card is imaged first and the frames are rebuilt from that copy, so the original is never altered, and raw files are opened where they can be to confirm they are whole rather than merely listed in a file table.
Hospitality supplies the other half of the town's work. Hotels and guest houses along Thames Street and up towards Clewer, restaurants in the lanes behind Peascod Street, the visitor operations at the theme park on the Winkfield Road, and the pubs and shops of Eton over the bridge, all running booking systems, tills and camera recorders that pick the busiest week of the year to give out. Beyond that, Dedworth, Clewer, Old Windsor and Datchet send the ordinary household drives, and a fair number of them hold decades of pictures of the same Long Walk.
None of it is collected. Media travels as a parcel: a card taped inside folded stiff card in a padded envelope so it cannot bend or vanish into the packaging, or a bare drive boxed so it cannot move. Send it tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, which from Windsor is next working day. Your own courier is welcome if you book and pay for it. There is no shop in Windsor or Eton to walk into with it.
The diagnostic is free and finishes 2 working days after arrival, at which point you are told what proportion is likely to come back and given one fixed price in writing. Memory cards and USB pen drives £250 + VAT. Any single hard drive or SSD, NVMe included, £300 + VAT. NAS boxes, arrays and servers from £500 + VAT depending on the disc count. CCTV or DVR £400 + VAT. BitLocker £400 + VAT. Forensic investigation with a report £800 + VAT. Logical faults, which covers most cards, run under no fix, no fee. Physical, electronic, board-level, water and fire damage take 50% of the quote up front and the balance only when the files are proven 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.