Published bands answer what things cost. They do not answer why your device sits in one band rather than another, which is the question people actually ring up with. Four worked examples do that better than any amount of explanation, so here are four, taken from the ordinary run of a week.
Two separate questions get tangled together constantly, and pulling them apart clears up most of the confusion. What kind of storage is it? That decides the number. What sort of fault does it have? That decides how you pay and what happens if it fails.
The bands go by media and nothing else. Memory cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, with NVMe on the same rung. CCTV and DVR recorder disks are £400 + VAT, and so are BitLocker or otherwise encrypted drives. RAID, NAS, SAN and server work starts at £500 + VAT and rises with the member count. A forensic investigation with a full written report is £800 + VAT, or £400 + VAT for a verified image with the deleted material extracted and nothing written up. That is the entire list, and it is set out with VAT itemised on the data recovery cost page.
The fault decides the terms. Logical faults — deletions, formats, a damaged file table, a partition that disappeared, corrupted firmware — run under no fix, no fee. Nothing worth having, no invoice. The published exclusions are electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs, and those take 50% of the quoted figure upfront, because donor parts are ordered for one specific drive rather than kept on a shelf. Notice what is not on that list: ransomware and BitLocker are not exclusions, whatever anybody else tells you.
A design student in the city brings in an eight-year-old MacBook Pro that stopped booting to a folder with a question mark. Three years of work, one copy. The storage in that generation is a 2.5-inch SATA disk held in by two screws, so the drive comes out and travels on its own, and the laptop stays at home. Free diagnostic, two working days, and the report says a head has degraded and roughly 94% of the surface is readable.
That is £300 + VAT, because it is one drive. Note what did not affect the number. It did not matter that the drive was inside a laptop rather than a tower. It did not matter that the machine was Apple rather than Windows. It did not matter that the drive was 500GB rather than 4TB. Capacity, brand and what the disk was bolted into never enter the arithmetic.
What did change something is that the fault is mechanical, so it falls in the exclusions: 50% of the quoted figure upfront, because a matched head stack has to be sourced for that particular model and firmware family. Had the same machine come in with an intact drive and a corrupted file system, the identical £300 + VAT would have run under no fix, no fee instead. Same price, different terms — which is exactly the distinction in the section above. Had this been a recent Apple Silicon machine, the answer would have been different again and considerably shorter, for reasons covered in the Mac post on this blog.
A photographer working out of Loughborough finishes a Saturday, puts the card in a reader on the Sunday and gets an offer to format it. She declines, ejects it, and posts it on the Monday. The card is imaged behind a write blocker, the file system turns out to be damaged rather than absent, and the folder structure comes back intact with every frame in it.
£250 + VAT, because it is a memory card. That band covers SD, microSD, CompactFlash, CFexpress, USB sticks and pen drives alike. It made no difference that the card was 256GB, that it was a professional model, or that the shoot was worth several thousand pounds — none of those things change what the bench has to do.
One decision she made was worth more than the entire fee, and it was free. She did not accept the format, and she did not put the card back in the camera to try a test shot. Either would have written to media that had not yet lost anything, and on a card with wear levelling you have no control over which physical blocks a new write lands on. The same job after a format and a handful of test frames is still £250 + VAT and comes back with less in it. Recovering a formatted SD card goes through what survives that.
A shop on the Golden Mile needs footage from the week of a break-in and the DVR has stopped playing anything back. The disk comes out of the recorder and travels on its own. It is £400 + VAT, in the recorder band, and the reason is not that CCTV is a premium service. It is that recorder manufacturers almost never use a normal file system: footage goes into proprietary containers, frequently as a continuous ring buffer with the index held separately, so the disk presents as unformatted to any standard tool. The extra work is reconstructing the container and rebuilding the timeline. DVR work is also one of the stated exclusions from no fix, no fee, so it is 50% upfront.
The same £400 + VAT band covers BitLocker and other encrypted volumes, for a different reason: the key material has to be handled safely and the image decrypted without ever writing to the original. The condition there is absolute and worth stating before anybody posts anything. Without a valid key nothing can be done, by anybody. If you have the 48-digit recovery key, or can retrieve it from the Microsoft account it was escrowed to or from Active Directory, the job is entirely ordinary. If nobody anywhere has it, the volume stays shut. BitLocker recovery sets out where the keys are usually hiding, and most people who think theirs is lost have not yet looked in the right place.
The fourth job is a four-bay NAS in an accountancy practice that dropped its volume after a power cut. That starts at £500 + VAT and moves with the disk count, and the arithmetic is straightforward rather than opportunistic: every member is imaged separately before any reconstruction begins, so four disks is four imaging jobs before the array analysis starts, and a failing member can take a day and a half on its own. That is why arrays are quoted after the assessment rather than before it. NAS recovery and RAID 5 data recovery cover the mechanics.
This industry has a reputation for numbers that move once the device is in somebody else's building, and the reputation was earned honestly. The mechanisms are easy to recognise once somebody has named them. A tempting figure with the word from in front of it, which grows after an assessment. An assessment charge that falls due regardless of whether anything comes back. A standard turnaround left deliberately slow so that the priority option looks necessary. And a definition of success loose enough that one readable file out of ten thousand supports the full invoice.
The way to test any quotation is to ask what happens when the answer is no. Say I decline your figure: is the assessment still free, and does the device come home? Say the recovery fails on a logical fault: is there an invoice? Say you find the job is worse than expected: does the figure I have already been given change? Those three answers describe a firm far better than the price on the front page does, and they are worth having in an e-mail rather than over the telephone.
Two more are worth asking while you have somebody on the line. What counts as a successful recovery here, and do I get to inspect the files before paying for them? And is this work done on your own bench or subcontracted to somebody I will never speak to? Neither question is rude, and both are asked constantly by people who have been through this once already.
Nothing you say on the telephone will reduce a bill as much as what you do in the first hour. Cut the power at the first unfamiliar noise. A drive switched off promptly is as inexpensive as that job is ever going to be; the same drive after two weeks of hopeful restarts is harder, slower and returns less. Keep software away from it. An overnight scan across tired hardware consumes precisely the reads a paid recovery is relying on, and more than one free tool writes its own working files onto the volume it is scanning. Refuse every offer to repair the volume. Repair utilities exist to make a file system consistent rather than complete, and they achieve consistency by discarding whatever will not add up; what CHKDSK costs you is the long version of that.
One observation about the university terms, because these parcels arrive in waves that follow submission deadlines almost exactly. Leicester, De Montfort and Loughborough between them produce the same job repeatedly: several years of work held in exactly one place, on a portable drive of a certain age that has been dropped at least once. A duplicate copy somewhere else costs less than the postage on a recovery and is the only insurance in this business that has never failed.
The journey is identical whichever band applies. Send the drive and keep the computer, with three exceptions: an external unit stays sealed in its own case, a NAS goes as a complete box, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key sits on the bridge board and not on the disk. Immobilise it in the packaging, put the printed shipping form in with it, and send it tracked and insured to Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. About seventy miles from Leicester, M1 down to Junction 19 and then east on the A14, with the lab two minutes off Junction 32 and parking outside; the desk there signs devices in Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Nobody collects. The freephone is 0800 689 0668.
The media sets the number and the fault sets the terms. A 500GB drive and a 16TB drive are the same £300 + VAT. A logical fault and a mechanical one at the same price are two different agreements — one runs no fix, no fee, the other takes half upfront. Anybody quoting you a figure before they have seen the device has guessed with your money.
Diagnosis costs nothing and finishes 2 working days from the moment Cambridge books your device in. The figure after that is written down and fixed. £250 + VAT a card or stick, £300 + VAT one drive or SSD.