One freephone line, one mailbox, and the people answering both are the people doing the recoveries. Describe the hardware and what it began doing, and before that working day is out you will have a view on what is likely to come back, which of the five bands the job sits in, and how to get the media onto the Cambridge bench without adding to the damage en route. 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
Asking commits you to nothing at all. Money enters the conversation once, at the point a written figure is in front of you and you have said yes to it.
Four boxes and somebody rings you back. Put the hardware and the symptom in the last one; formalities are not required.
Somebody rings before the working day is out (Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm). If it genuinely will not wait, the freephone line is faster: 0800 689 0668.
Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Free from a mobile as well as a landline, and answered by people whose entire week is failed storage.
Cambridge Data Recovery
Compass Housewww.cambridge-datarecovery.co.uk
Put Cambridge Data Recovery on the label, and your own name and mobile number on a slip inside the box. Two things get it there: post that is tracked and insured, or a courier of your own booking. Devices are also taken across the counter at reception, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm — two minutes from Junction 32 of the A14, parking at the door. No Leicester shopfront exists, and no van is coming to you.
Is it still screwed into a laptop, a tower, an iMac, a MacBook, a server or a recorder? Then the drive comes out first and travels by itself. Equipment is not taken apart at this bench, and flash soldered directly onto a mainboard — Apple Silicon Macs, a few ultraslim laptops — will not lift off for anybody.
Prefer it in writing? support@cambridge-datarecovery.co.uk is where both forms on this site deliver. The engineers read it themselves; there is no marketing department in the middle.
Two PDFs go with the parcel. Fill in the first and lay it on top of the packing — that is what puts a job number against your device within minutes of the lid coming off.
↓ Shipping and booking-in sheet (PDF)
↓ Our terms and conditions (PDF)
Give the free online diagnostic two minutes and it returns a reading. Hardware, badge, symptom, and then the fault that combination generally proves to be, the one action worth taking today, and which band it sits in — all with the device still sitting on your desk.
Trading halted by a server, a RAID set or a NAS? Say so on the telephone. The job is flagged before the box arrives and its examination is moved up the bench queue. The band does not change for the hurry: £300 + VAT one drive or SSD, arrays from £500 + VAT.
None of this is meant to be mysterious. Here is every stage a job passes through, in order, with the two points where the decision belongs entirely to you marked as such.
Telephone, form or email, whichever you prefer. Three facts are wanted: what the hardware is, what it is doing, and roughly when it started. Two sentences will do.
Back the same working day. What the fault probably is, which of the five bands it lands in, and whether spending money on postage is worth your while at all.
Drive or card on its own, packed tight enough that nothing shifts, booking-in sheet inside, and a tracked, insured service bought. Cables and caddies stay at home.
Reception opens the parcel, sets a job number against it and messages you to confirm it landed. From that point the media is in the laboratory, not on anybody's desk.
Two working days from arrival, and not a day earlier. Electronics, mechanics, firmware, the state of the surface and the file system are each judged in turn, and a single fixed figure falls out at the end.
Agree it and the recovery begins. Decline and the media is posted back to you. Reaching that point costs nothing, and the figure does not shift once you have agreed it.
Two questions decide the figure and no others: what class of media has arrived, and what has broken inside it. How urgent it sounds on the telephone changes nothing. Neither does the value of what is stored on it, which is the oldest trick in this trade and one nobody here has any interest in playing.
Five figures, and that is the complete list. The middle one serves three jobs instead of splitting into three, which is why a report-free forensic image costs what a recorder disk costs rather than opening a tier of its own. Nothing else is billed, no extra rate appears halfway through, and which band your media falls into is decided by what it is rather than by how the week has been going.
Everybody assumes ransomware will be charged differently. It is not. Hardware decides the band, and the alarm around it decides nothing: £300 + VAT if the encrypted data is on a single drive, from £500 + VAT if it is on a server, a NAS or an array. Under no circumstances is a ransom paid on anybody's behalf.
VAT is added to each line and shown as its own entry on the quote rather than folded into the figure. Carriage is whatever you choose to buy in each direction, and the encrypted drive your files come home on is included.
That leaves the question of who stands to lose. No fix, no fee applies to logical recoveries — a deleted folder, a formatted volume, a file system in pieces, sound hardware a machine simply refuses to acknowledge — and where one of those returns nothing, no invoice is raised. Named as exclusions: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs, forensic jobs. Physical work is 50% upfront, since donor parts have to be bought and clean-bench hours spent regardless of what the platters do afterwards, and the remaining half only falls due once the files are back in your hands. Whichever of the two footings you are on is printed on the quote itself, and the data recovery cost page works through what stands behind each band.
The post office does most of the work of getting a job here. A drive that is already unwell travels better boxed and insured than rattling around a car for a day of errands, and something dropped into a Leicestershire postbox this afternoon is generally logged in at Cambridge tomorrow.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.
Run the wizard. Two minutes, nothing personal asked until the end, and a reading that says whether posting it is worth your time.