Lutterworth is a small town with one of Europe's largest distribution estates on its doorstep. Magna Park runs day and night on warehouse management systems, and the operations around it — hauliers, third-party logistics, engineering off the A5 — depend on servers whose failure stops the picking rather than merely inconveniencing an office. That changes what a recovery has to achieve and how fast.
Anything posted from Lutterworth 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.
When a WMS host stops, the site stops. Most of what comes off this estate is a RAID 5 or RAID 6 set that has shed a member and then lost a second during the rebuild, or a virtualisation host whose datastore will no longer mount — and a datastore holding a dozen virtual machines is one volume as far as the array is concerned, so the array has to be reconstructed before any individual machine exists again. The procedure is the same either way. Power down rather than retry, label every member disk with its bay number, photograph the front of the chassis before a single disk moves, and send the disks alone without the enclosure or the controller. Each is imaged separately and the set is assembled in software, so nothing depends on the original hardware behaving. Servers and arrays start at £500 + VAT and rise with the member count.
Recorders are the estate's other regular. Gatehouses, yards and loading bays run sixteen or thirty-two channels writing continuously, and when an incident has to be handed to an insurer or the police the unit has usually looped over the period several times. Unplug it rather than leaving it running, because every hour powered is more of the window overwritten, and send the drive out of the recorder instead of the recorder itself. That work is £400 + VAT. DVR jobs are one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, along with mechanical and electronic failures, chip-level work and forensic jobs, so the free diagnostic exists precisely to tell you what is still there before you commit.
Ransomware turns up here more than anywhere else on this list, and it is priced as ordinary media rather than as anything exotic: £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for an array, exactly as if the encryption had been a file system fault. It is not forensic work and it is not quoted as forensic work. Take the affected machine off the network, stop using it, and do not run clean-up tools that write to the volume, because shadow copies, unallocated space and application caches are where a partial recovery usually comes from and all three are fragile. Where an incident has to be evidenced formally, that is a separate forensic job at £800 + VAT with a full written report.
Urgency is handled honestly. A job flagged as business-critical before it arrives is put in front of the queue for booking-in, diagnosis and extraction, and that genuinely saves time. What it cannot do is make a damaged disk image faster than it safely can. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after the media is booked in, and a straightforward single-drive recovery runs 2 to 4 working days after approval; arrays depend on the member count and the condition of the disks. You will be given the real timescale rather than the one that closes the sale.
There is no office at Magna Park, none in Lutterworth and no collection service anywhere in Leicestershire. Most sites here already hold courier accounts, and a booked courier is treated exactly like insured post at this end — the address is Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, which is two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Reception takes devices by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Put a note in the box with a name and a mobile number that will be answered, because the diagnostic ends in a phone call.
The full price list is five bands and does not move: £250 + VAT for a card, USB stick or pen drive; £300 + VAT for a single hard drive or SSD; £400 + VAT for a CCTV or DVR recorder drive and the same for a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted disk; from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS and SAN arrays and servers, rising with the member count; £800 + VAT for a forensic investigation with a full written report. A forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report is £400 + VAT. Logical recoveries are no fix, no fee; physical work is half up front with the balance only on success. 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.