Coalville grew on the pits and now runs on plant, stone and distribution — the quarrying around Bardon and Whitwick, the estates off the A511, the haulage yards that serve both. Snibston's mine buildings have gone but the trades that followed them still keep their records on machines living in dusty offices, site cabins and portacabins, which is a harder life than a computer is designed for.
Anything posted from Coalville 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 transport office's data is unglamorous and impossible to recreate. Job sheets, driver hours, vehicle maintenance histories, the invoicing that hangs off all of it, and increasingly a folder of dashcam clips that somebody's insurer wants. It sits on a tower under a desk in a cabin with the heating off at weekends, on a supply that dips every time the yard equipment starts, in air carrying more stone dust than anybody would tolerate in an office. Disks in that environment do not last as long as the same disk on a desk, and the drive that finally gives out is rarely the one anybody was watching.
More physically damaged media comes off this patch than any other on the list. A laptop that went off a tailgate. An external disk that spent a fortnight sliding around a van footwell. A machine that took a surge when something big switched on. Physical faults — heads resting on the platters, a seized spindle, a burnt preamp or a scorched board — are clean-air bench work with donor parts, and they are charged differently from everything else: half the quote before that stage, the balance only if the data is proven back. They are also among the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, along with chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. If a drive is ticking rhythmically or scraping, the single most valuable thing anybody can do is switch it off and leave it off.
The quarry and plant side sends larger jobs. Weighbridge records, ticketing, survey and drone data, the shared drive with every drawing and permit on it, usually on a small server or a four-bay unit in a locked room that nobody visits between failures. When one of those loses a member, the disks come out and travel on their own, each written with the bay number it occupied, and the chassis stays where it is. Servers and arrays start at £500 + VAT and rise with how many members are in the set.
The other avoidable disaster is software. When a drive starts misbehaving the instinct is to download a repair tool, and the tool installs itself onto the very volume you are trying to rescue, writing over the space the deleted material occupies. If a disk is failing mechanically, scanning it repeatedly is worse still, because each pass is another few hours of hard use on a component that is already marginal. Unplug it, put it in a box, and let the imaging happen on equipment built to read damaged surfaces gently.
There is no depot in Coalville, no counter and no van that comes to a yard, here or anywhere else in Leicestershire. Media goes by insured post or by a courier of your own to Cambridge Data Recovery on Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, and reception will take a device by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Only the drive travels, out of the machine and padded so it cannot move — except an external drive, which stays in its case, and a NAS, which goes complete.
Every figure that could apply to a yard or an office here is published in advance. RAID, NAS and server work opens at £500 + VAT and moves with the member count. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. A recorder drive out of a CCTV unit is £400 + VAT, which is also what a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted disk costs. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. A forensic investigation ending in a full written report is £800 + VAT. Whichever band applies, the diagnostic behind it is free, closes 2 working days after booking-in and produces one written quote; a straightforward single-drive job then runs 2 to 4 working days. 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.