Pages like this one usually stir three unrelated subjects into a single soup, so they are kept apart here: the contact details you type into a form, the physical device you hand over to a laboratory, and the technical residue every web browser leaves behind merely by loading a page. Written to be read rather than scrolled past. This version is dated August 2026.
For everything below, the controller in the UK GDPR sense is Leicester Data Recovery — the trading name under which this laboratory's work is sold to households, sole traders, professional practices and companies across Leicester, Leicestershire, the East Midlands and anywhere else a parcel will reach. There are no premises in Leicester. Bench, imaging hardware, donor stock and job records all sit at one address, Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, roughly seventy miles away and two minutes off Junction 32 of the A14. Anything on this page can be raised on 0800 689 0668 during Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, or in writing to support@cambridge-datarecovery.co.uk, and the reply comes from somebody who works on the jobs rather than from a ticketing system.
There are two of them. One asks for a callback and lives on the contact page; the other closes the free diagnostic after a device, a manufacturer and a symptom have been chosen. Four identical fields sit on both: something to call you, something to ring, somewhere to send the written quote, and a free-text box for your own version of events. On the diagnostic the three clicked answers ride along too, so that whoever picks up the phone already knows whether the subject is a ticking 3.5-inch disk or an encrypted volume nobody can open. That is the sum of it. There is one more field in the markup, hidden on purpose and labelled to be left empty: automated form-fillers fill it, human beings never see it, and any submission arriving with text in that box is thrown away unread.
Date of birth is never requested. A postal address is asked for only at the point a parcel genuinely has to travel back to you. Card details are never typed into this website at all, because no part of it takes payment; invoicing details are gathered separately once a job is going ahead, and they live with the accounts rather than in any marketing tool.
Two of the six UK GDPR bases carry nearly all of this. Answering an enquiry, quoting for work, taking a device into custody and performing the recovery are all steps taken on your instruction, either before a contract exists or in the course of delivering one, which is Article 6(1)(b). Keeping invoices and job records afterwards for the period HMRC requires is a legal obligation, Article 6(1)(c). That leaves legitimate interest, Article 6(1)(f), which covers an engineer noting how an unusual fault behaved so the next example goes better — a note about hardware, not about the person who owned it.
Consent for marketing is relied on nowhere, for the simple reason that no marketing is sent. Completing a form buys an answer to the question you asked and nothing else. There is no newsletter here and no list quietly gathering names.
Freephone calls are not recorded. Whatever an engineer writes down during one amounts to the same handful of facts a form would have collected, filed against the job so the next person to answer is not starting from a blank page. The chat window in the corner comes from Olark. It carries whatever you type into it, and that is handled on exactly the same footing as an email.
The box is opened at reception, its contents written against a job number, and the media passed through into the laboratory. Beyond that point it is handled only by the engineers working on it. No part of the job is sub-contracted, nothing is forwarded to a second laboratory, and nothing goes home in somebody's bag to be looked at over a weekend. Where a drive has to be opened, it is opened under filtered air inside the building it arrived at.
A sector-level image is where almost every job begins, and everything afterwards is performed on that copy instead of on the thing you posted. It is the reason a fragile drive can lie untouched on a shelf while the awkward part of the work goes on somewhere else. It is equally the reason the next two sections exist, since that image is a complete duplicate of what you sent.
Contents have to be visible for three parts of the job and no others: reading the file system, putting directory trees back together, and demonstrating that what goes home actually opens. That is exactly where the line is drawn. A document is opened to confirm it is undamaged rather than to discover what it says; a photograph is inspected as a thumbnail, which proves the image data came through and nothing more. Nothing is copied out for any purpose of ours, nothing is displayed beyond the laboratory, and nothing is discussed with anybody except the engineers on that job and the person whose name is against it.
Two exceptions exist, and they are set out here rather than tucked away in a footnote. Where a UK authority produces a court order or a statutory demand, it is complied with. Where material is of a kind whose mere possession is a criminal offence, it is reported — an obligation every laboratory in this country carries equally.
An investigation works to different rules, since inspecting content and writing it up is the whole point of the exercise. Scope is set by whoever gave the instruction — a solicitor, an employer, an insurer — and the report is delivered to them. Alongside it runs a chain-of-custody record naming who held the media and when. That record is not a formality: it exists so that it can be produced later and argued with. Footage exported from a recorder is handled on the same basis. Where you are the subject of an investigation rather than the party who ordered it, your rights over the material run through whoever ordered it.
The word destroyed in that list means a multi-pass overwrite of whatever storage the image lived on, or, where a disk is coming out of service for good, its platters physically broken up. It does not mean a folder dragged into a recycle bin.
In the building: access is controlled, the recovery area sits behind a second door, and media is put away rather than left about on desks. Nothing goes to a third party at any stage. On the systems: working storage is encrypted, recovered files travel home on encrypted media with the passphrase sent by a separate route, and a job's storage is reachable only by the engineers assigned to it. As for this website, it holds no customer database for the simple reason that none is ever built — the forms hand straight off to mail and retain nothing at all.
Traffic crossing the internet can never honestly be described as impossible to intercept, and no such promise is made here. What can be said is narrower and more useful: the forms carry contact details and nothing else, never the data under recovery, and recovered data goes home as a physical object on encrypted media instead of travelling down a wire at all.
Work, media and job records never leave the United Kingdom. Two third-party scripts already mentioned are the exception. Olark and Google Fonts are both served from abroad, which means opening a page here does dispatch a request overseas, under whatever transfer safeguards those two suppliers publish. Neither is compulsory. Ring the freephone number instead of opening the chat window, and set your browser to refuse third-party font requests: this site will then draw itself in a system typeface and behave in every other respect exactly as before.
An IP address, the time, the page asked for and the browser string: that is the minimum any web server has to write down in order to send a page back and to notice when it is being abused. Those logs rotate and are thrown away on a short cycle. Google Fonts keeps a comparable record while it delivers typefaces. As for cookies, not one here advertises, follows you between sites or feeds an analytics suite. The only cookie you are at all likely to meet belongs to the Olark chat window and is there to remember a conversation already in progress so you do not have to begin again. Turn it down and the site behaves identically.
Personal information held about you carries a set of rights under UK GDPR. All of them are honoured here, and none of them is argued over:
Telephone 0800 689 0668 or write to support@cambridge-datarecovery.co.uk saying which of these you want. Identification may be asked for first, for the single reason that information must not reach the wrong person.
Start with us, on the telephone or in writing, and the matter will be treated seriously. Should the outcome still not satisfy you, the United Kingdom's supervisory authority is the Information Commissioner's Office, which accepts complaints at ico.org.uk or over its helpline. There is no charge for going to the ICO, and doing so makes not the slightest difference to how your recovery is handled.
Adults buy this service. None of it is aimed at children and no age information is gathered anywhere. Where the device happens to belong to a child, everything is conducted with the parent or guardian who asked for the recovery in the first place.
Which version you are reading is given by the date in the opening paragraph. Where a change materially alters the handling of information it is written into this page, and where it touches a job already under way the customer hears it directly instead of being left to spot an edit on a website.
Freephone 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Email support@cambridge-datarecovery.co.uk. Post to Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. The commercial terms are in the terms and conditions (PDF), and the contact page covers getting a device here undamaged.