Oadby has the racecourse, the botanic garden and most of the University of Leicester's halls, which makes for an unusual mix: settled family streets on one side of the road and several thousand students on the other. In practice that means laptops — thin ones, with a single SSD inside and a deadline attached to whatever is on it.
Anything posted from Oadby 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.
Flash storage fails without a warning noise, which is why an SSD failure feels so abrupt: no clicking, no slowing down, just a drive that is missing from the boot menu. When the controller has failed or the firmware has corrupted while the memory itself is intact, that is a real and often successful job at £300 + VAT. But the honest limit belongs here too. Delete a file from an SSD and leave the machine running, and TRIM will normally have cleared those cells within minutes — not marked them free, cleared them — so there is nothing underneath to reconstruct. Anybody promising otherwise is selling a scan that will come back empty. The sooner a machine is powered down after an accidental deletion, the better the odds, and on flash that window is measured in minutes rather than days.
The halls put a rhythm on the year. From the middle of the second term the same jobs arrive: a laptop that will not start with a submission on it, an external drive of interview recordings, a shared disk carrying a group project that only one person ever held. Term deadlines are not a reason to cut corners on imaging, but they are a reason to say what matters first — once a quote is approved you can nominate the folders that need pulling ahead of the rest, and those are checked before the full extraction runs.
Liquid is the other student classic. A drink into a keyboard reaches the board before anybody has finished swearing, and the instinct is to dry it out and try again. Do not power it back on. Corrosion continues quietly under the surface, and a machine that boots once after a spill often does not boot twice. If the drive is removable it comes out and travels alone; if it is soldered to the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon and many recent ultrabooks, there is genuinely nothing to send and no honest way round it. Water damage is physical work, so it takes half the quote up front with the balance only if the data returns.
Away from the halls, Oadby is ordinary suburban work. Shops along The Parade with till and back-office machines. The businesses around the racecourse and the events that use it. Households with a single external disk holding every photograph taken since about 2006, still doing duty as the only copy. External drives travel sealed in their cases rather than opened up, and on a WD My Passport or My Book that rule is absolute, since the encryption key lives on the enclosure's bridge board rather than on the disk.
There is nowhere in Oadby to hand a laptop over and nobody comes out to collect it. Take the drive out where you can, pack it so it cannot move, and post it tracked and insured to Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, or book your own courier. Reception takes devices in person Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Phones and tablets are not accepted at all, whatever is on them.
Every figure is published in advance: £250 + VAT for a card, USB stick or pen drive; £300 + VAT for one hard drive or SSD, NVMe included; £400 + VAT for an encrypted disk or a CCTV recorder drive; from £500 + VAT for arrays and servers, by member count; £800 + VAT for a forensic investigation with a full written report. The diagnostic costs nothing and closes 2 working days after booking-in; single-drive recoveries usually finish 2 to 4 working days after approval. Logical faults carry no fix, no fee. Freephone 0800 689 0668, 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.