Ashby-de-la-Zouch has a ruined castle in the middle of it, the National Forest around it and the canal running south towards Measham, so a fair share of the town's trade involves visitors: holiday lets, pubs, wedding photography, the shops along Market Street. The media that arrives from LE65 is often not a hard drive at all. It is a card out of a camera, and the person holding it has one shot at getting this right.
Anything posted from Ashby-de-la-Zouch is looked at free of charge. A single written figure arrives before the work does: £300 + VAT one drive or SSD, £250 + VAT a card or stick, arrays from £500 + VAT.
A card formatted in the camera by mistake is the most hopeful case on this whole list, because formatting writes a new index rather than new photographs — the frames themselves are still sitting in the same cells until something writes over them. Which is why the only thing that matters is what happens next. Take the card out, put it somewhere safe, and do not shoot another frame on it, do not let the camera re-format it again and do not let a phone or a laptop write anything to it. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. A card snapped through the chip, or one whose controller has died, becomes chip-level work, and chip-level work is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee — the free diagnostic will say which of the two you have before any money is discussed.
The visitor trade sends the rest. A holiday let's booking history and accounts on one laptop, a pub's office machine with the rotas and the stock ordering, a photographer's working disk holding a season of weddings that have not been delivered yet. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT regardless of capacity, and a photographer's second copy, if it exists, is normally on an external drive that has been carried in a car boot all summer, which is its own kind of risk.
Small trades around the town and out towards Moira and Measham keep the same pattern in a different shape: a builder with a folder of job photographs and certificates, a joiner with drawings and quotes, a canal business with moorings and maintenance records. It is one machine and one copy in almost every case. Where a recovery succeeds, what comes back arrives on fresh encrypted media rather than on the drive it came off, and you decide in writing whether the original is posted back with it or destroyed.
Some things genuinely cannot be undone, and it is fairer to say so at the start. Once data has been written over, it is gone — there is no equipment that reaches underneath an overwrite. Flash soldered to a mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines, cannot be removed and cannot be read. Deleted files on an SSD have usually been cleared by TRIM within minutes. Phones and tablets are not accepted at all. Everything else — computers, external drives, NAS units, servers, cards, sticks and recorder disks — is worth asking about.
Ashby has nowhere to drop a drive in and there is no collection service in Leicestershire, so it travels. A card or a stick goes in a padded envelope, tracked, with a note giving your name and a number that will be answered. A hard drive comes out of the machine and is packed so nothing shifts; an external drive stays sealed in its own case. It all goes to Cambridge Data Recovery on Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, and if you would sooner make the run yourself that reception accepts hand-delivered devices, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm.
None of this is quoted by guesswork. A memory card, USB stick or pen drive is £250 + VAT. Any one hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. A BitLocker or otherwise encrypted disk is £400 + VAT, which is also the band for a CCTV or DVR recorder drive. RAID, NAS and server work opens at £500 + VAT and climbs with the member count. Forensic investigation ending in a full written report is £800 + VAT. Finding out costs nothing at all: the diagnostic closes 2 working days after your media is booked in, and once a figure has been approved a card or a single drive is usually back with you inside 2 to 4 working days. Logical faults carry no fix, no fee. Freephone 0800 689 0668, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm.
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.
The examination is free, a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, and a card or a stick is £250 + VAT.