Syston sits where the Fosse Way crosses the Wreake, with light industry along the Melton Road and Barkby Road estates and Watermead Park on the other side of the water. It is a town of small firms — engineering suppliers, joiners, print, a good many family businesses — and the box holding their shared drive is nearly always a four-bay NAS on a shelf in the corner.
Anything posted from Syston 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 NAS that has vanished from the network is usually not a dead NAS. A single member disk drops out, the unit will not mount the volume, and the web interface responds by offering to initialise or re-create it — which is the one offer to refuse, because accepting it writes a fresh empty structure over the layout that holds your files. LinkStation, TeraStation and Synology units all keep their own arrangement of Linux software RAID and either ext4 or Btrfs on top, and reading that back is ordinary work provided nobody has rebuilt over it first. A NAS is also one of the few things that travels whole: send the complete unit with the disks inside, rather than pulling them out. NAS and array work starts at £500 + VAT and rises with the member count.
The estates along the A607 send the single-drive jobs. A workshop PC running the stock and job system, a print firm's artwork machine, a supplier's quotation history — usually one disk, occasionally an SSD, always the only copy. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT whatever its size, and the diagnostic that arrives at the final written figure is free. Where a machine has simply grown old, that is often the whole diagnosis; a disk that has run continuously in a warm workshop for eight years has done its work.
It is worth saying plainly that a NAS is not a backup. Two disks in a mirror survive one disk failing and nothing else: not a surge on the ring main, not a theft, not somebody encrypting the share from an infected desktop, not a volume deleted in the interface by mistake. Firms find this out at the worst possible moment. The copy that saves a business is the one held on different media and kept somewhere other than the building the original lives in.
There are no premises in Syston, nothing at Watermead and no collection from anywhere in Leicestershire, so the unit goes by post or by a courier you book. A four-bay NAS is heavy and awkward, so pack it in a box that keeps its shape with the disks secured inside, and address it to Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. Reception takes deliveries and personal drop-offs Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. A server or a rack-mounted RAID is the opposite case — send the member disks alone, each marked with its bay position, and keep the chassis.
Nothing about the figures changes with the postcode. A NAS, RAID or SAN, and any server, starts at £500 + VAT and moves with the member count. One hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Encrypted disks and CCTV recorder drives are £400 + VAT. Memory cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. A forensic investigation with a full written report is £800 + VAT. The diagnostic ahead of all of that costs nothing and closes 2 working days after booking-in, and a single-drive job is generally finished 2 to 4 working days after the quote is approved. Logical work is no fix, no fee; mechanical and electronic failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs are the exclusions, and physical work takes half up front. 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.