When storage fails at the wrong moment the useful question is not who answers the phone at midnight but what you do in the next ten minutes. This page gives that away for nothing, symptom by symptom, then sets out exactly what speed is available: a job flagged before the parcel lands, a free diagnostic that closes two working days after booking in, and no surcharge for being in a hurry.
There is no emergency premium: a drive is £300 + VAT, an array from £500 + VAT. Ring the freephone before you post and the job is flagged, so it reaches the front of the diagnostic queue the moment the parcel is booked in. The diagnostic itself costs nothing.
Almost every recovery is decided in the first hour, usually by somebody trying one more thing. Find the line below that matches what your storage is doing and follow it before you do anything else.
Switch it off at the wall and leave it off. Those noises mean the mechanism inside cannot find its bearings, and every further spin-up drags heads across surfaces they are already damaging. There is no software fix and no test worth running. Each attempt to see whether it sounds better today measurably reduces what comes back.
Press Cancel and unplug it. Both of those actions write a new structure over the one recording where your files begin, and both are offered precisely when that structure is the thing that has gone wrong. The data underneath is almost always intact at the moment the box appears, and considerably less so afterwards.
Do not rebuild yet. A degraded array still holds every byte, and a rebuild is the heaviest read those remaining disks have done in years. Copy the live data off to somewhere else first. If that is not possible, power the unit down and let the members be imaged before anything is replaced.
Stop using the machine and shut it down properly. Deletion removes the pointer rather than the contents, so the data sits there until something writes over it, and a computer left running writes constantly on its own account. Do not install recovery software onto the same disk you are trying to recover.
Do not dry it out, do not put it in rice, and above all do not power it on. Wet electronics that are switched on short out, and salt or dirt left drying on a platter is far worse than the water was. Seal it in a bag, keep it damp rather than baked dry, and get it here quickly.
Disconnect the affected machines from the network now, before the encryption reaches everything else, and do not reformat or reinstall anything. What is realistically recovered is what the malware missed, deleted originals it left behind and earlier versions. It is priced as ordinary media, not as forensic work.
Ring the freephone before you post and the job is flagged in advance, so the moment the parcel is booked in it goes to the front of the diagnostic queue rather than joining the back of it. That is a real difference and it is free. It means a drive posted on Special Delivery this afternoon can be examined the day after it lands rather than sitting in a queue, and it means the person who opens the box already knows the history and knows it matters.
The other genuinely fast option is your own car. The bench takes drop-offs at the Cambridge address between 9:00am and 5:30pm, Monday to Friday. From Leicester that is about 70 miles — the M1 south to J19, then east on the A14 — roughly an hour and a half, with the building two minutes off Junction 32 and parking outside the door. Somebody who leaves Leicester at nine has handed the drive over before eleven, which no courier can beat.
There is no twenty-four hour hotline. There is nobody on call at three in the morning, no engineer who drives to your premises, and no collection service anywhere in this network. The lab works Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5:30pm, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after the media is booked in.
Plenty of firms advertise all of the above. Some of them mean an answering service and a courier account. It is more useful to tell you what actually happens so that you can plan a bad week around facts rather than around a promise that quietly turns into a call-back on Monday morning.
The price bands are published and they do not move because you are in a hurry. A single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Memory cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. A CCTV or DVR recorder disk is £400 + VAT, as is an encrypted volume where you can supply the key. RAID arrays, NAS units, SAN volumes and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the number of members. Forensic work is £800 + VAT with a written report, or £400 + VAT for a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report. Ransomware is priced as ordinary media wherever it lands.
Urgency changes the order things are looked at in. It does not change the figure, and anyone charging a premium for panic is selling you the panic.
A depressing share of the jobs that arrive here have been made harder by an hour of well-meant troubleshooting: a clicking disk powered on five more times, a repair utility run against a volume that was simply mounted in the wrong order, a rebuild started on an array with a second tired member, recovery software installed onto the very drive it was meant to save. None of it was foolish. All of it made the eventual job longer, and some of it made parts of the recovery impossible.
If you take one thing from this page: the storage stops being your problem to solve the moment it starts behaving strangely. Power down, write down what happened, and ring.
Day one, a tracked parcel handed over in Leicester leaves the same evening. Day two, it is delivered and booked in, and you get a call to confirm it arrived. The free diagnostic closes two working days after that booking-in — never sooner, because a proper look at a failing disk takes the time it takes — and it produces a fixed written figure and an honest completion date at the same moment. Nothing is started until you authorise both.
From authorisation, a straightforward single-drive job is generally finished within two to four working days. A drive that needs mechanical work in the clean air of the bench takes longer, because a donor has to be matched before anything is opened. An array takes longer again, since every member is imaged separately before a single file appears. Those are working days, and they are honest ones rather than the fastest anybody has ever managed.
Rushing the parcel is the one shortcut that regularly costs people the recovery. Take the drive out of the laptop, the tower or the recorder — the machine is not needed and the bench does not dismantle equipment. Wrap the drive so it cannot move inside a rigid box, and post it tracked and insured.
Three things travel whole rather than stripped down, and getting these wrong is expensive: an external drive stays in its own enclosure; a NAS goes in complete with its disks in their bays; and a WD My Passport or My Book goes whole with its cable, because the encryption key on those lives on the bridge board rather than on the disk, and separating them makes the data unreadable to anybody. A Fusion Mac is a fourth case but not a whole-machine one: both of its drives come out and travel together, each labelled, while the iMac stays where it is. A RAID or server is the opposite case — send the member disks only, labelled with their bay order, and photograph the front of the chassis first. Storage soldered to a mainboard cannot be removed and cannot be posted.
What the device is, how it failed, what it sounds like, and — the important one — exactly what has already been tried. Nobody is scoring you. A drive that has had three hours of recovery software run against it needs a different approach from one that was switched off immediately, and knowing which you have saves a day.
Have the capacity to hand if you can, and some idea of what matters most on there. On a large job it genuinely changes the order the work is done in, so the accounts folder or the wedding photographs come out first rather than last.
Nearly every job that arrives here in a worse state than it needed to be spent an hour being helped first.
A padded box and a tracked label do more for a struggling disk than any amount of driving around with it. Royal Mail Special Delivery handed over in Leicester in the afternoon is generally on the Cambridge bench the following working morning, which is faster than most people manage in person.
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.