Hinckley knitted hosiery for two centuries and now mostly makes and moves things instead. The M69 runs across the top of the town, the estates either side of it hold light manufacturing and distribution, and the Britannia Centre is the shopping middle of it. Most of what comes to this bench from LE10 is business media rather than family photographs — a server that will not mount, a design machine that has mislaid a fortnight of drawings.
Anything posted from Hinckley 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.
Firms of this size run one box and trust it completely: a four-bay unit in a comms cupboard, or an elderly tower server with a mirrored pair inside. A degraded set is not yet a disaster, and the step that makes it one is authorising a rebuild onto a replacement while the remaining member is already tired. Take the power off instead and leave it off. Then label each disk with the bay it came out of, photograph the front of the chassis before anything is pulled, and send the member disks alone — not the case, not the controller, not the rails. Every disk is imaged individually before any array is assembled in software, so the originals are never staked on a live rebuild. Arrays, NAS units and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the member count.
What manufacturing remains here is precise work: injection moulding, tooling, textile machinery, the shops that support them. The files worth losing sleep over are drawings, machine programs, quotations and the nested cutting layouts that took somebody a day each. Those tend to live on a fast NVMe module in a design PC, and NVMe dies without symptoms — no noise, no slow decline, simply gone from the boot menu one morning. It is quoted at the same £300 + VAT as a spinning disk, and the diagnostic will say plainly whether the controller has failed with the data intact or the cells themselves are past reading.
Away from the estates the town behaves like any other of its size. Traders around Castle Street and the Britannia Centre with tills and back-office machines. Practices and agencies in the offices behind the market place. Households in Burbage and Barwell with one external drive holding everything since the children were small. That last one is the most common single item on this bench anywhere, and it has a rule of its own: an external drive travels sealed in its own case, exactly as it is, which is the opposite of the rule for a disk inside a computer.
Nothing is collected from Hinckley and there is no shop front here to knock on, which is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight — one properly equipped bench costs less to run than a row of counters and is a large part of why a single drive is still £300 + VAT. Media goes by insured post or by your own courier to Cambridge Data Recovery on Vision Park, or across the counter at that reception, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. A parcel handed in on Castle Street this afternoon is generally logged in tomorrow.
Costs are published and do not move once written down. A memory card, USB stick or pen drive is £250 + VAT. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. A CCTV or DVR recorder drive is £400 + VAT, as is a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted disk. RAID, NAS and SAN arrays and servers start at £500 + VAT and go up with how many members they hold. A forensic investigation ending in a full written report is £800 + VAT. The diagnostic is free and closes 2 working days after booking-in; a straightforward single-drive recovery takes 2 to 4 working days after approval. Logical faults are no fix, no fee; electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs are excluded from that, and physical work is half up front. Freephone 0800 689 0668.
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.