Market Harborough largely works for itself: consultancies, accountants, architects and marketing people operating out of converted rooms in the streets off the High Street, with the Old Grammar School on its pillars in the middle and Foxton Locks ten minutes up the road. The typical LE16 job is not a server rack. It is one person's Mac and the portable drive that sits beside it.
Anything posted from Market Harborough 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 one-person practice usually owns an iMac or a MacBook and a USB disk doing Time Machine duty, which is a real backup right up to the moment both are on the same desk during the same power cut. APFS containers, encrypted volumes and drives that have been half-converted between formats make up a steady share of what arrives from this postcode. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled, because the pair are one volume and neither half is much use alone. Where storage is soldered to the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines and some thin PCs, it cannot come off and cannot be helped — you will be told that on the phone rather than after you have paid for postage. Any single drive or SSD that can be removed is £300 + VAT.
Portable drives are the other constant, and one of them catches people out badly. A WD My Passport or My Book must travel whole, in its case and with its cable, because the encryption key on those units lives on the small bridge board inside the enclosure rather than on the disk itself. Open the case to save postage, post the bare disk, and what arrives is an unreadable brick — unreadable to us as much as to anybody else. Every other external drive follows the same principle in a gentler form: leave it sealed and send it as it is, cable included if it has its own supply.
Because so much of the town's work is somebody else's work, a share of what comes in is not really recovery. A partner leaves and a laptop has to be examined. A dispute needs an account of what was on a machine and when. That is forensic work and it is priced separately: an investigation ending in a full written report is £800 + VAT, while a forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report is £400 + VAT. Both are agreed in advance rather than under no fix, no fee, because what is being bought is the record as much as the files, and the honest thing to say first is that continuing to use the machine destroys exactly the evidence you are asking about.
One limit is worth stating clearly before anybody packs a jiffy bag. This bench does not take phones or tablets. There is no partner shop, no arrangement and no exception, so if the photographs are on an iPhone or the notes are on an iPad, that is not work anybody here can accept. Computers, external drives, NAS units, servers, memory cards, USB sticks and recorder disks are the whole list.
Nobody keeps a counter in Market Harborough and no van goes out from anywhere, so the drive has to travel. Post it tracked and insured, or book your own courier, to Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD — one working day from the post office on the High Street. Reception there takes devices in person Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm, which from LE16 is a straightforward run across on the A14. Whichever way it goes, you hear from us as soon as it is booked in.
Prices are the same from this postcode as from every other: £250 + VAT a card or USB stick, £300 + VAT any one hard drive or SSD, £400 + VAT an encrypted disk or a CCTV recorder drive, from £500 + VAT for arrays and servers by member count, £800 + VAT for forensic work with a report. The diagnostic is free and closes 2 working days after the media is booked in; single-drive recoveries usually finish 2 to 4 working days after approval. Deleted files, corrupt file systems and vanished partitions are logical work and run under no fix, no fee. Mechanical and electronic failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs are excluded from it, and physical jobs take 50% before the work with the balance 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.