Melton Mowbray sells pork pies and Stilton to the rest of the country and keeps the paperwork for it on one desktop in a back office. Batch and traceability records, recipes, supplier invoices, the sheet that says which lot of cheese went where — very little of it exists twice, and the first anybody hears of that is the morning the machine boots to a black screen instead of a login.
Anything posted from Melton Mowbray 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.
Producers here run small and lean. A bakery with six staff, a cheese maker with a cold store and a van, a butcher supplying half a dozen farm shops: the accounts, the labelling artwork and the audit trail sit on one five-year-old desktop disk in a warm room, and there is no second copy because nobody sold them one. What lands from LE13 is usually exactly that drive, either clicking or refusing to be seen at all. £300 + VAT covers any single hard drive or SSD regardless of size, and the free diagnostic that fixes the quote costs nothing whether you go ahead or not.
The villages out towards Waltham, Bottesford and the Vale send a different machine. Farm offices keep herd records, movement paperwork and grant claims on a PC that has stood in a cold corner since long before decent broadband reached it, and cold, damp and a supply that dips whenever something starts up in the yard all shorten a disk's life. Age is the honest diagnosis in most of those cases. A drive that has spun for a decade in an unheated room is not failing because of anything anybody did wrong.
Recorders are the other Melton regular. Shops along Nottingham Street, the cattle market, cold stores and loading bays all have a DVR humming under a counter, and by the time an incident has to be produced for an insurer or the police the box has generally been overwriting itself for months. Send the drive out of the recorder rather than the recorder itself; it is normally two screws and a lead. That work is £400 + VAT, and DVR jobs are one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, alongside mechanical and electronic failures, chip-level work and forensic jobs — so you get the realistic odds before anything is agreed rather than after.
Restraint is worth more than effort in the first hour. A disk that has started to click or grind should be switched off and left off, because every further attempt to boot drags the heads back across the surface that has to be read, and a surface can only be read so many times. Do not let anybody install recovery software onto the drive you want rescued. If a volume asks to be formatted, decline. Almost every job that arrives here in poor shape got there through a fortnight of well-meant attempts rather than through the original fault.
Melton has no branch of this to visit, and neither does anywhere else in the county — there is no counter, no unit and no collection round. The bench is at Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, which is two minutes off Junction 32 of the A14 with parking outside the door. Insured, tracked post gets a parcel there overnight from any post office in the town, a courier you book yourself is treated identically at this end, and reception will take a device across the counter Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm if you would sooner drive it. Pack so nothing can shift, and put a note in with a name and a number that gets answered.
The published bands are short: £250 + VAT for a memory card, USB stick or pen drive; £300 + VAT for one hard drive or SSD; £400 + VAT for a CCTV or DVR recorder drive and the same for an encrypted one; from £500 + VAT for a NAS, RAID or server, rising with the member count; £800 + VAT where a forensic investigation with a full written report is what is needed. The diagnostic closes 2 working days after booking-in and a finished single-drive recovery normally runs 2 to 4 working days after you approve the figure. Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. Physical work is 50% up front, the balance only if the data comes back. Ring 0800 689 0668 free, 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.