Loughborough is a university town with a working edge to it: engineering sheds behind the campus, a bell foundry that has been casting since the middle of the nineteenth century, and a belt of small manufacturers who supply both. Drives that arrive from LE11 tend to hold either a term of unrepeatable work or a production line's only copy of something, and their owners usually discover which on a morning when the machine will not start.
Anything posted from Loughborough 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.
The university sets the calendar. From about February the parcels change character: a laptop that will not get past its own logo with a dissertation inside it, a portable disk of rig telemetry from a sports science study, a lab PC whose second disk carried eighteen months of readings that nobody had thought to copy anywhere. Where the material sits under an ethics approval or a sponsor's agreement, the job runs under a confidentiality agreement, whatever is recovered comes home on fresh encrypted media, and the source disk is either posted back or destroyed to your written instruction. Any single hard drive or SSD, NVMe included, is £300 + VAT.
Managed machines complicate that rather than ending it. A good share of Loughborough laptops are estate-issued and encrypted, and where a disk is locked with BitLocker the image has to be unlocked before there is anything readable to work on, which is why an encrypted drive is £400 + VAT rather than £300 + VAT. You need the recovery key, or somebody in IT who can produce it. Without one there is no honest route through the encryption, and you will be told that during the free diagnostic rather than discovering it attached to an invoice.
The engineering side fails differently. Simulation output, CAD assemblies and measurement sets live on fast NVMe modules, and flash gives no warning at all — no ticking, no gradual decline, just a module the BIOS listed on Friday and does not list on Monday. Ext4 volumes on Ubuntu workstations turn up nearly as often, usually after a journal has been left inconsistent or a kernel update has gone badly. From the desktop that looks total. Underneath, the extents are generally still where they were put, and rebuilding the structures around them is ordinary bench work.
Off campus the town is straightforward East Midlands industry: the foundry, plastics, instrument makers, the trade around the Empress Road estates. The recurring job there is a mirrored pair in a cupboard where one disk died quietly months ago and no one noticed the amber light until the survivor gave up too. If a set has dropped a member, pull the power and leave it out. Letting the box rebuild onto a tired replacement writes across the very structures a reconstruction has to read, and it is the one action that reliably turns a good job into a poor one. Arrays, NAS boxes and servers begin at £500 + VAT and climb with the member count.
Nothing here is walked into. There is no counter on Baxter Gate, no unit on the industrial estates and nobody who drives out to fetch a device, in Loughborough or anywhere else in the county. Take the disk out of the tower or the laptop and send the disk on its own — the machine, the caddy and the mains adaptor stay at home. An external drive is the exception and goes sealed in its own case. Special Delivery is tracked and insured and reaches Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD the next working day; your own courier account does the same job. If you would rather hand it over, that reception takes devices Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm, and the drive is about seventy miles away: M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east.
Finding out where you stand costs nothing. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after the parcel is booked in, and it ends in a call and one written figure that does not move afterwards. Those figures are: £300 + VAT for any single hard drive or SSD; £250 + VAT for a memory card, USB stick or pen drive; £400 + VAT for an encrypted disk or a CCTV recorder drive; from £500 + VAT for a RAID, NAS or server, according to how many members it has; £800 + VAT for a forensic investigation ending in a full written report. Once a quote is approved most single-drive recoveries finish inside 2 to 4 working days. Logical faults carry no fix, no fee. Mechanical and electronic failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs are the published exclusions, and physical work takes half the quote up front with the balance due only on success. The freephone number is 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.