Lost gets used for four separate situations: deleted, an index that no longer works, a partition that has vanished, and a drive that will not mount at all. They need different methods and they carry very different odds. What every one of them has in common is that the drive should be switched off now, before anything else is decided.
Flash media is £250 + VAT and a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Working out which of the four situations you are actually in costs nothing at all, and every logical fault on this page carries the no fix, no fee guarantee.
People arrive using the same word for four unrelated situations, and the odds are different in each. Working out which one you are in is the whole of the diagnostic, and it decides whether this is an afternoon of work or a week of it.
The friendliest version. Deleting removes the entry that points at your file and marks the space as available; on a spinning disk the content sits there untouched until something else claims it. A drive switched off within the hour is a very different proposition from one used for another fortnight.
Harder, and sometimes impossible. When the operating system frees a block on an SSD it usually tells the controller it may erase it, and the controller often gets on with that within minutes. Read the block afterwards and it returns zeros. Not every setup behaves that way, which is why it is worth asking rather than assuming.
The files are all still there and nothing can find them. A corrupted master file table, a broken FAT or a damaged catalogue leaves a drive that mounts empty, or shows as RAW, or offers to format itself. Logical work, done against a copy, and it runs under no fix, no fee.
Disk Management shows the right sized disk as unallocated space and Explorer shows nothing at all. In most cases the partition table has been damaged or overwritten while the data behind it is untouched. Creating a new partition on top is the one thing that turns this from easy into hard.
Clicking, silent, warm, or visible in the BIOS and nowhere else. No software fixes any of that, and running more of it just keeps a failing drive working. This is a hardware job and it starts by leaving the drive switched off.
The honest category. Where new data has been written across the sectors that held the old, those sectors now hold the new content and there is nothing underneath to recover. Old versions and fragments elsewhere on the disk are sometimes worth chasing, but the file itself is gone.
This matters more than any software anyone will recommend to you. A running computer writes constantly without being asked: event logs, search indexes, thumbnail caches, update downloads, restore points, browser history, cloud sync. Every one of those writes lands somewhere in the free space, and free space is exactly where your deleted files are still sitting. An hour of ordinary use after the loss does more damage than the deletion did.
If the files were on the system disk, shut the machine down properly and leave it off. Not sleep, not a quick check of your email first. Off. If they were on an external drive, unplug it and put it in a drawer. Everything else can be decided calmly afterwards; this cannot, because the window closes on its own whether or not anybody is watching.
A good share of the calls that start with lost files end with the files never having been on the drive in the first place. Cloud sync is the usual culprit. OneDrive, iCloud and Google Drive all keep a deleted items area of their own, reachable from a browser and typically holding thirty days of history, and none of it is visible from the folder on your computer. If the folder that emptied was inside OneDrive or a synced Documents folder, look there first, because that is a two minute fix rather than a two hundred pound one.
Three more worth ruling out. Files On-Demand can leave a folder looking empty when the contents are simply not downloaded yet. A Windows update or a badly timed sign-in occasionally lands somebody in a fresh temporary profile, so the desktop is empty while the real one sits untouched under another folder in Users. And File History or Time Machine, if either was ever switched on, may hold a copy from last week that nobody remembers configuring. None of these need a laboratory, and every one of them turns up here more often than you would expect.
It sounds obvious written down and it is the single most common self-inflicted wound in this trade. Downloading a recovery tool onto the affected drive writes the installer, its libraries and its temporary files into the free space, which is the one part of the disk that must be left alone. People have overwritten the very folder they were trying to rescue with the program that was going to rescue it.
If you are going to try software, do it properly. Run it on a different computer with the affected drive attached as a second disk or through a USB adapter. Point the output at a third device with room to spare. Never let a tool write repaired structures back to the source, and never accept an offer to fix the drive on the way through. If the drive is making noises, or dropping out, or taking an age to respond, stop and post it instead. Software cannot help a failing mechanism, but it will keep it working hard while it tries.
Nothing is scrubbed when you delete something. The directory entry is marked as no longer in use and the clusters holding the content are added to the free list. The content itself stays exactly where it was until the operating system decides to reuse that space, which might be seconds later or might be months. That single fact is why the first advice is always to stop using the drive, and why a card taken out of a camera the moment the mistake was noticed is one of the highest yielding jobs there is.
An SSD manages its own space. When the operating system reports a block as free, the drive is normally told it may wipe it, and the controller clears those blocks in the background so they are ready for the next write. That is what keeps an SSD fast, and it is also why deleted data on one is often unrecoverable within minutes rather than months. There are exceptions worth checking: external SSDs connected over USB do not always pass that instruction through, some controllers are lazy about it, and a drive powered off immediately after the loss never gets the chance. None of that is promised in advance, which is the point of a free diagnostic.
Both are logical faults and both are worked the same way. A full image is taken first, then the structures are rebuilt on the copy. Where the index can be repaired, files come back with their original names and folder trees intact. Where it cannot, the fallback is carving, which finds files by recognising their internal structure rather than by consulting any directory. Carving works well on photographs, video and office documents, and it is honest to say what it costs you: the names and the folders do not come back with them. A carved recovery is a large pile of correctly recovered files with machine-generated names, which needs sorting afterwards.
The band depends on what the files are sitting on. Flash media, by which we mean memory cards and USB pen drives, is £250 + VAT. One disk, spinning or solid state and NVMe included, is £300 + VAT. Anything with several disks in it opens at £500 + VAT. The diagnostic costs nothing, closes two working days after your media reaches the bench and never sooner, and the price is fixed in writing before a single hour of work is authorised.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Deleted files, damaged indexes and vanished partitions are all logical, so all three carry the guarantee outright. A drive that has failed mechanically or electronically takes half the quoted figure upfront instead, and you are told which side of that line your job falls on before you commit to it.
Two things sit outside intake entirely: mobile phones and tablets. If the photographs are on a handset rather than on storage that unbolts, this is not the right bench and it is better to say so now than after the postage.
Media reaches the lab by post, and the address is Guildford Business Park, roughly 40 minutes down the A322 and the A3 if you would rather drive it and hand it in at reception. Cards and pen drives travel well in a padded envelope. Bare drives need a proper box. Jobs come in from the offices along the A329M, from Wokingham and Reading, from Windsor, Ascot and Camberley, and from London commuters who noticed on the train home. If you would rather describe the problem to a person before you seal the parcel, the freephone number is 0800 689 0668 and somebody answers it between 9:00am and 5:30pm on weekdays.
The window closes on its own while a computer runs. Switch it off, then decide what to do next in your own time.
Post is how almost every job here starts. A tracked, insured parcel is far gentler on a struggling drive than a car boot and a day of errands, and something handed to Royal Mail in Bracknell today is normally booked in at the Guildford bench tomorrow.
If the storage is still bolted into a laptop, a tower, an iMac, a server or a CCTV box, unbolt it. The bare drive is what the bench needs, and no machines are dismantled at this end. Any repair shop will pull one out in a few minutes if you would rather not. The exception, and it is a hard one, is storage soldered directly to the logic board — Apple Silicon Macs, a few very thin Windows laptops, most tablets. If it does not come out, there is nothing that can be posted.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Write Guildford Data Recovery on the label. Driving it down from Bracknell is roughly 40 minutes on the A322 and the A3; posting it costs you an envelope and a day. Either way you get a call once it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days later.
Not sure what should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it ask the questions.