Five bands, printed in full, and they apply in Leicester exactly as they apply anywhere else with a postbox. Almost everything arriving here falls into one of them, and which one your job falls into is confirmed in writing the moment an engineer has looked at the hardware. VAT is separate and always shown.
Nobody pays to find out. Not for the wizard on this site and not for the engineer's examination at Cambridge. The only invoice that ever arrives is one you read and approved first.
Which band a job lands in is settled by the media and the fault, and by nothing else at all. No one is asked to put a value on the files before being told the price, and urgency in a caller's voice has never once shifted a number. VAT goes on top of every band below and appears as its own line.
SD, microSD, CompactFlash, CFexpress and the stick that has lived on somebody's keyring since 2019. Where a controller has stopped answering the reader, the flash behind it is read directly instead of through the interface.
Mechanical or solid state, 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch, M.2 or NVMe. Whatever the disk was bolted into never enters the arithmetic, so a tower drive, a laptop blade and a disk lifted out of an external case share a rung.
The disk out of a CCTV or DVR unit, with the hours you actually need exported and documented. The same figure covers a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted drive where the recovery key can be produced or the account behind it traced.
RAID sets, NAS boxes, SAN volumes and servers. Every member earns an image of its own before a stripe is calculated, so it is the member count and nothing else that carries the total upwards.
An examination carried out and reported to a standard that expects to be argued with afterwards. Remove the written report and what is left is a forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction, which lands back on the £400 rung.
That is five bands and not six. The forensic image without a report is £400 + VAT, which is the same £400 as a recorder disk and the same £400 as a BitLocker volume. It shares a rung rather than adding one, and a price list that counts it twice is padding itself.
Condensed to a sentence: a hard drive or an SSD is £300 + VAT with NVMe included, a memory card or USB stick is £250 + VAT, anything with several disks inside it — RAID, NAS, SAN or a server — opens at £500 + VAT, recorder disks and BitLocker volumes are £400 + VAT, and forensic casework with a report is £800 + VAT. Your own number comes out of a free diagnostic and is written down before anything is opened.
You can supply both of them without leaving your desk, and between them they place the great majority of the diary.
How many disks are in it. One piece of media carries a flat figure. Once a set is involved the sum changes shape, because each member has to be copied separately before there is any question of reassembling a volume, and the copying is where most of the labour sits. Three disks is genuinely less work than six, so the price follows the count rather than pretending the two jobs are the same.
Whether the hardware failed or only the data did. A deleted folder, a formatted volume, a partition that stopped appearing, a file system that came apart on a disk which still runs perfectly: all of that is logical, and it is both the cheaper side of the line and the safer one. A drive that ticks, that never spins up, that was knocked off a desk or had a drink go through it needs a donor mechanism, a clean-air enclosure and hours of bench work before the first sector is read.
One further question applies to a minority of jobs, and it is whether the result has to survive being challenged by somebody who was not in the room when it was produced. Recorder footage, encrypted volumes and investigation instructions are worked under a method built for exactly that, and they are charged and settled on their own footing rather than the ordinary one.
Notice which question is never asked. Nobody here enquires what your files are worth or how badly you want them. A trade known for weighing up the customer before naming a number ought to publish its numbers instead, and that is why this page exists in place of a contact form.
Ransomware sits in the ordinary media bands. One encrypted drive is £300 + VAT; an encrypted array or server is from £500 + VAT. Those are the same figures any other fault would attract. It is not forensic work, it does not cost £800 + VAT, and nobody here handles or pays a ransom for you. Recovery runs through snapshots, shadow copies, remnants and whatever the encryption run never reached, and there is more on ransomware recovery.
The diagnostic is free at both stages, which matters most to somebody still deciding whether to send a drive at all. The wizard on this site asks for no card details. The engineer's examination once the media reaches the bench is not charged either, no matter how many hours it absorbs. Out of it comes one number, fixed, in writing. Say yes and work begins. Say no and the media is posted back to you. Neither answer generates an invoice.
No fix, no fee applies to logical recoveries — deleted or formatted files, a corrupt file system, a partition that has disappeared, a healthy disk the machine refuses to acknowledge. If nothing can be brought back from a fault of that sort, nothing is payable.
Five categories sit outside that guarantee and they are named rather than tucked away: electronic failures, mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. Work in any of them runs at 50% upfront, and the remainder becomes due only once the files have been proved back. The reason for the split is straightforward arithmetic rather than caution. Matched donor mechanisms, head and motor transplants, board-level repair, chips lifted from a card and firmware surgery all consume money and bench hours before a single readable sector exists, and a laboratory that ignored that would simply recover the cost from everybody else's invoice.
Forensic instructions are settled in full before they start. What is being bought there is an examination and a document, not a folder of files, and the deliverable exists whichever way the findings go. The full investigation with its written report is £800 + VAT. Where no report is wanted, the forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction is £400 + VAT.
Nothing at all happens before the media turns up. Work is carried out at Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. From Leicester that is the M1 to Junction 19 and then east on the A14: some seventy miles, about an hour and a half, with the building two minutes off Junction 32 and parking at the door, though almost everybody uses the post rather than driving it over. Assessment closes 2 working days from booking in. A completed single-drive recovery takes 2 to 4 working days from the point you approve the number.
A quote here is a single number rather than an hourly rate with parts bolted on at the end, so it is worth spelling out what sits underneath it.
The examination that produced the quote is already paid for, whichever way you decide afterwards. So is every part the job turns out to need: a matched donor mechanism for head or motor work, a replacement board, an adaptor for a connector that was never designed to leave a machine. Tracking down a suitable donor is frequently more work than fitting one, and none of that searching appears anywhere as a line.
Bench time follows. That means the clean-air enclosure, the tooling that draws a head stack clear without letting it brush a platter, and as many attempts as an obstinate mechanism turns out to require. Then imaging, on hardware designed to read past a weak region and come back to it later rather than sit in front of it, including the repeated passes a tired surface asks for. Then the reassembly: directory structures rebuilt, the file system mended on the copy and never on your disk, and real documents opened at the end to prove they behave.
Finally the data travels home on new storage. Nothing is ever written back onto the drive that failed. Your original is returned to you afterwards or destroyed securely, whichever you put in writing.
Only two things fall outside the number. You buy the postage in, since the choice between a tracked service and a cheap one belongs to you rather than to us. And the tax is added rather than absorbed, which is why the quote carries a recovery fee on one line and VAT on another, and lets you see both before committing to either.
Absent from the list is the part of this trade with the poorest reputation. Looking is never billed. There is no scale by the gigabyte, no surcharge for sounding worried, no fee for a summary of an ordinary recovery, and no daylight at all between the number quoted and the number invoiced. That last one is the entire purpose of putting it in writing at the start.
Four jobs off this bench, each with the band it landed in and the terms that came attached. What varies between them is the detail rather than the procedure, and the procedure is always the same: examine, quote in writing, wait for a yes.
The disk was mechanically sound. A folder had been dragged somewhere nobody could find again and then partly written over. Logical from start to finish, so £300 + VAT with no fix, no fee still in force — had the images not come back, the invoice would have been nothing.
One member dropped out in February and the alert went to a mailbox belonging to somebody who had left. A second gave up in July. All four disks were imaged one at a time and the volume raised from those images, with nothing written back to the originals: from £500 + VAT, the total set by the member count.
A CFexpress card that mounted normally and displayed nothing whatever. Flash work at £250 + VAT, and among the faster jobs in the queue: the directory had gone, the frames had not, and both cards from that Saturday came back complete.
Recorder work sits on the forensic footing regardless of what prompted it, so the £400 + VAT was settled before anything started. The relevant clips were exported with their timestamps intact and documented well enough for the insurer to take them at face value.
Free diagnosis first, one fixed number second, and no work at all until you have said yes to it.
Very little of this work is handed over in person. It arrives as a parcel, which suits hardware that has already stopped behaving: boxed, padded and insured is a gentler seventy miles than the M1 in a glovebox. Something posted in Leicestershire this afternoon is normally booked in at Cambridge the next working day.
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.