Loughborough and Coalville in the north-west, Melton Mowbray and Syston to the east, Oadby, Wigston and Market Harborough to the south, and Hinckley and Lutterworth out along the M69 and the M1. The whole county posts its failed storage to one bench near Cambridge, and the part where somebody works out what is actually wrong is the part nobody pays for.
Where a parcel was posted never changes the price. A drive or SSD is £300 + VAT and arrays start at £500 + VAT, each number fixed in writing 2 working days after booking in.
Leicestershire earns its living in a handful of distinct ways and the postbag mirrors that closely. These six patterns make up the bulk of an ordinary week, and every one of them is priced off the bands published on this site.
Magna Park at Lutterworth, the yards around Junction 21, the run out towards Hinckley. Warehouse systems, pick lists and delivery records held on one server, where a stalled array stops the loading bay along with the paperwork. From £500 + VAT, counted by member disk.
Drawing archives, machine programmes, test results and quality records. Often a single tower in a partitioned office, occasionally a four-bay box that nobody has looked at since the week it was installed. Loughborough alone accounts for a steady share of the postbag.
Traceability paperwork, batch records and years of photography, kept on an office machine and copied to an external drive that was last plugged in some time ago. Any single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT regardless of what it was doing.
Leicester and De Montfort between them fill a great many machines with material that exists in exactly one place: fieldwork, measurement runs, a thesis three years in the making. Student laptops and research workstations arrive here in roughly equal numbers.
Weddings at Foxton Locks, race and show weekends, drone work over Bradgate Park and Charnwood, and every school sports day in between. Cards fill considerably faster than anybody empties them, and flash work is £250 + VAT.
Trade counters, workshops, pubs and small shops with a CCTV or DVR unit above the door. The disk comes out, the relevant hours are exported and documented so that an insurer can follow them, and that work is £400 + VAT.
Each town below has a page to itself with local detail on it. The list starts at Loughborough and Coalville in the north-west, runs east to Melton Mowbray and Syston, drops south through Oadby, Wigston and Market Harborough, and finishes at Hinckley and Lutterworth on the M69 and the M1. Leicester itself has the front page. Anywhere smaller belongs with whichever of these is closest, and not one part of the service alters with the postcode a parcel was handed over in.
LE11 and LE12. A university town with an engineering trade behind it: research machines, test-rig data, student laptops and the small manufacturers off the Derby Road. Any single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT.
LE13 and the villages around it. Food producers keeping traceability and batch records, farms, and the external drives that hold a business's only copy of its photography.
LE10, where the M69 meets the A5. Logistics offices, engineering workshops and trade counters, along with the recorder disks that follow a break-in at £400 + VAT.
LE16, in the south of the county towards Foxton Locks. Professional practices, consultants working out of converted outbuildings, and two-bay boxes bought as a backup and never checked since.
LE67 and the old coalfield. Quarrying, plant hire and distribution, where the paperwork tends to live on one office machine with a NAS in the corner of a site cabin.
LE18, south of the city. Household drives and small-business laptops in roughly equal number, plus the portable drives that hold a family's only copy of everything.
LE2, with the university halls and a great deal of home-office work. Macs are noticeably common here, and a Mac drive or blade is £300 + VAT wherever the storage unbolts.
LE7, on the Fosse Way north-east of the city. Workshops, hauliers and home offices, along with the USB sticks and memory cards at £250 + VAT that carry work between them.
LE17 and Magna Park. Warehouse and distribution systems where a stopped server stops the shift, so multi-disk work from £500 + VAT dominates the postbag from this postcode.
LE65, out towards the canal and the National Forest. Small manufacturers, holiday and hospitality businesses, and the CCTV recorder disks that follow a quiet weekend.
Leicestershire is straightforward to travel out of and thin on recovery laboratories, and both halves of that deserve saying outright. The M1 runs the length of the county, the M69 ties it to Coventry, and the A46 and the A6 pick up most of the rest. What the county has never contained is a properly equipped clean-air bench, because donor stock, imaging hardware and firmware tooling all have to be paid for whether or not anybody is using them, and a place this size cannot keep such a room occupied. So the storage travels instead of an engineer: tracked and insured through the post, or on a courier you arrange yourself, and from a Leicestershire counter that generally puts it on the bench the next working day.
The address is Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. That is around seventy miles from Leicester — the M1 south to Junction 19, then east on the A14 — an hour and a half in ordinary traffic, with the building two minutes off Junction 32 and parking outside the door. Two consequences follow, and both are stated on every page of this site. There is no Leicester office, no counter to walk into and nobody who drives out to collect a drive. And the Cambridge reception does take devices across the counter, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, if you would sooner hand yours over than trust it to the post. Most people post, and the rest of this page assumes it.
Close by and capable are separate things, and once a disk has failed mechanically only the second is any use. A clicking drive wants filtered air to be opened in, a matched donor to supply parts, and an imager that treats a weak sector as an obstacle rather than a full stop. Kit of that sort costs more than a small shop turns over in a year. So the shop down the road generally accepts the job, slips your drive into a jiffy bag, sends it off to a laboratory and marks up whatever returns. Nobody is misleading anybody. It just means the parcel lands on a bench like this one regardless, a week later, having passed through one more pair of hands.
The second thing worth weighing is how fast you find out where you stand. Assessment finishes 2 working days from the day your device is booked in and ends in one number, fixed, in writing. Not a bracket, not an estimate, and not something that swells once work is under way. Getting that far costs nothing whatever, and what you do with the number afterwards is entirely up to you.
Backup and recovery get typed as a single phrase, and in this county people search for disaster recovery in Leicester a good deal, so the two are worth pulling apart. Nothing here is sold as a backup service: no contracts, no cloud storage, nothing with a monthly fee. This is a bench that retrieves data once something has already gone wrong. What it will tell you about backup costs nothing — copies belong on separate media, kept away from the machine they are protecting, and checked occasionally by opening a file at random. A NAS in the same cupboard as the server it duplicates is not a second copy, and neither is a mirrored pair, as the RAID 1 page explains. Where a whole office has stopped rather than one disk, that is covered on IT disaster recovery in Leicester.
Most weeks the typical job is one disk — a 3.5-inch pulled from a tower in an office off the Fosse Way, a 2.5-inch out of a student laptop in Oadby, the drive inside an external case that stopped being recognised one evening. It all travels the same route and meets the same bands. A memory card or a pen drive is £250 + VAT. One drive or SSD, spinning or solid state and NVMe included, is £300 + VAT. A recorder disk out of a CCTV or DVR unit is £400 + VAT, and so is a BitLocker volume where the key can be produced. Anything holding several disks opens at £500 + VAT and rises with the count. Forensic casework written up in a report is £800 + VAT; the forensic image with deleted-file extraction and no report is £400 + VAT. VAT goes on top of each, and data recovery cost sets out what sits behind every band.
The service does not stop at the county line either. The same overnight run picks up parcels from Nottingham, Derby, Northampton, Rugby, Coventry and the rest of the East Midlands, and not one of those postmarks changes a figure or a place in the queue. Storage still fixed inside a laptop, a tower, a server or a recorder has to be freed before it can travel, and any repair shop will do that for very little. Common routes in are hard drive recovery, SSD recovery, NAS recovery and RAID 5 data recovery, alongside external drive recovery, LaCie recovery, server data recovery and the Apple Mac guide. Where a disk is physically failing rather than simply confused, hard drive repair explains what the phrase honestly covers, and HDD recovery in Leicester goes further into the mechanical side.
Every band published, VAT shown separately.
Mechanical failures and what they sound like.
When a whole office stops, not one disk.
The multi-disk job the county sends most often.
Two working days, no charge, one written figure.
Send it tracked and insured, get a free assessment inside 2 working days, and nothing starts without your yes.
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.