Three questions, and a button answers each of them: the class of hardware, the badge on the front, and the behaviour that brought you to this page. What comes back is the fault that combination has usually turned out to be, the one action worth taking about it today, and an honest span of days for that class of repair. Nothing personal gets asked before the last step, and even then only so somebody can confirm the reading over the telephone.
Diagnosis is not something this laboratory sells. Not the version on this page, and not the full examination at Cambridge either. An invoice comes into being only once you have read a fixed figure and agreed to it.
Getting as far as a price costs nothing at any stage; the number itself is decided once your media has been on the bench in front of somebody. A logical fault — a folder deleted, a volume formatted, indexing that has fallen apart — stays on the no fix, no fee footing, so if nothing comes back nothing is billed. Where the trouble turns out to be electronic, mechanical, or in the surface itself, donor parts and clean-bench hours have to be spent before a sector can be read at all, and that is why half the figure is settled at the outset. Chip-level, DVR and investigation instructions are settled before they start. Whichever of these applies to you is printed on the written quote before a screw moves.
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. Written questions reach the bench at support@cambridge-datarecovery.co.uk. The two PDFs: ↓ booking-in sheet · ↓ terms and conditions
Fill in four boxes and an engineer rings back with a considered view instead of a sales pitch. Nothing in it obliges you to anything at all.
Somebody reads it and will be back to you before long. Already decided to post the media? Put Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD on the label.
Rather say it out loud than click it? 0800 689 0668 is open Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, and support@cambridge-datarecovery.co.uk reaches the same engineers. Your own account of the fault is worth every bit as much as these buttons are.
Two things decide the band: the class of media, and what has gone wrong inside it. How badly the files are wanted decides nothing whatever. Three of the five published bands between them cover very nearly everything that arrives here, and your own figure is written down once the hardware has been on the bench.
Pen drives, and SD, microSD or CompactFlash cards of any capacity at all.
One disk of any kind, platters or flash, whatever it was taken out of. NVMe blades too.
Anything with several disks in it — arrays, NAS units, servers, SANs — counted a member at a time.
Two narrower bands close the list. Take £400 + VAT first, since one figure there does duty for three jobs with nothing in common: the disk lifted from a CCTV or DVR unit, an encrypted volume whether BitLocker or otherwise, and a forensic binary image with its deleted files pulled out where nobody has asked for a report. Add the report and the instruction becomes £800 + VAT, settled up front, with anything genuinely large or spread over several devices scoped and quoted on its own. Five figures in total, then, and one of them stretched across three kinds of work rather than divided into three tiers. Nor is ransomware a sixth. It borrows the media figures like everything else does — £300 + VAT where a single drive was encrypted, from £500 + VAT where a server, a NAS or an array was. Risk falls either side of the line dividing logical from physical. No fix, no fee applies to logical recoveries, meaning deletions, formats, file systems in fragments, and healthy hardware a machine flatly declines to acknowledge. On the exclusion list, published and unchanging, sit electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs — the jobs wanting a donor board, a transplanted head and motor, chips taken off a card, or work at the depth of firmware and the service area. Every one of those spends money before a sector has been read at all, which is precisely why physical work is 50% upfront. A few jobs a year run past everything listed here: a board burnt beyond reading, media in two pieces, a set that occupies a whole shelf. Those get a figure of their own, in writing, and nothing begins until you have read it.
The bench examination is engineering rather than five minutes with a downloaded scanner. Its order is fixed, because what each stage finds determines whether the next can safely be attempted at all, and the whole sequence closes 2 working days from arrival rather than any sooner.
Nothing at all happens until the power is understood. Supply rails, bridge and controller board are tested, and the drive's own ROM is lifted and put somewhere safe.
Heads, bearings and platter surfaces are assessed with nothing turning. Until that assessment exists, no awkward read gets attempted.
Service area and translator go under the PC-3000. Damage at that depth is completely invisible to anything running on an ordinary computer.
One careful imaging pass settles how much of the platters, or of the NAND, is willing to hand data over, and records exactly where the weak ground is.
The structures are mapped, so what you get back is a list rather than a percentage: folders intact, folders damaged, folders past helping.
A single price, set against the fault actually found instead of the one imagined. Say yes and work begins; say no and the media is posted back. Either way you have paid nothing.
There are only so many ways for storage to fail, and each of them announces itself the same way nearly every time. Take the repeated tick: a head stack hunting for a position it cannot locate. The beep about once a second: a spindle motor trying to start and abandoning the attempt. A device that appears at a capacity it never possessed: a controller in difficulty. An offer to format a volume: broken indexing sitting on top of hardware in perfect health. There is no fortune-telling anywhere in that. It is pattern matching against a very long queue of jobs that arrived before yours.
Your three answers therefore get looked up against what that particular combination has meant in the past, and out comes the probable cause, its effect on the odds, and the action most likely to protect them. This is not an examination and makes no pretence of being one. A scored platter, a translator that has collapsed, a few thousand sectors gone quietly deaf: none of these is visible from a web page, and any tool that says otherwise on the strength of three button presses is selling something.
It is also blunt where bluntness earns its place. Urgent symptoms are told to stop using the device now, with the reason attached. Faults outside what this laboratory handles — soldered flash first among them, then mobile phones and tablets — are named on the screen rather than after you have paid for the postage.
Unplug it. Dull advice, and still the most useful sentence on this page, because three clocks are running simultaneously. Ask a failing mechanism for another rotation and it eats a fraction further into itself. A deleted file lasts exactly until something else is written into the space it used to occupy. An SSD in trouble goes on quietly rearranging its own translation tables for as long as current reaches it. Pull the plug and all three stop in the same instant — and none of them restarts while the thing waits in a padded box for the postman to collect it.
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.
Pack the bare media properly, put your name and a contact number in the box with it, and buy a tracked, insured service.