Data recovery pricing receives an awful lot of negative attention for many reasons, mainly due to two pricing models: teaser prices which triple upon initial assessment, and evaluation prices (also called "evaluation charges" or "diagnostic fees") that essentially place your hard drive in limbo until you pay the company enough money so they can tell you how much they are going to charge you to recover your lost data. This article will take the opposite approach: this is all of our pricing listed out for you, as well as an explanation of exactly where each price comes from.
Memory cards and USB sticks both have an anatomy which consists of a controller connected to NAND flash memory and both tend to fail the same way: the controller or the connector breaks while the flash stores all of your data. Each component of the path to recovery is covered by the charge; namely, the logical recovery process when the media is still recognised, micro-soldering of broken connectors, and chip-by-chip reading, with the controller’s scrambling solved via software, if none of those options answer.
There is one fixed price for a single memory card (or USB stick), regardless of its size (from a £6 freebie to a 512 GB high capacity storage device). There is no difference in the amount of time and effort required to perform the recovery.
This is the most common type of service requested; however, most markets make it very complicated. The examples include a clicking head requiring replacement parts; a dead board that requires transplantation of ROM chips; rebuilding firmware using the PC-3000; recovering an SSD that needs to be cajoled into producing information through engineering modes or read chip-by-chip; or Mac computers that have removable drives that need to be copied in whatever manner possible based upon what the fault allows. The possibilities are endless, and therefore, the hours spent working on your faulty drive will vary widely depending upon the fault. Therefore, we charge the same price for every type of fault.
We charge a flat rate for this reason. You cannot possibly know how damaged your drive may be prior to starting the recovery process. If we charged per fault, we would simply be telling you how much you owe after you have already sent us your drive. When we charge a flat rate for each type of service we provide, it places the risk of the true cost of recovering your data on us, where it belongs.
RAID/NAS/server work begins at £500 and will be quoted for each individual project for an honest reason: every single disk within the membership of the array is imaged in its own right prior to any attempt to implement the logic of the array. Eight disks are essentially going to take more cautious time-consuming hours to get through than four. The written quotation you receive at diagnosis will include all factors (disk count/condition and complexity), and this is where your quotation will stay.
What never appears on this line: per gigabyte pricing, "criticality" surcharge, or a higher charge based upon how valuable the data may be. The array does not know what is contained within it; the bill should not either.
There are some jobs that exceed the usual bandings due to the unique nature of the work and as such, it's best to acknowledge this before you post anything. BitLocker recovery costs a fixed £800 + VAT; CCTV / DVR / NVR systems cost a fixed £400 + VAT; encrypted volumes & proprietary surveillance filesystems are bench work requiring time to accomplish, not drive jobs with a twist. Virtual machine recovery and forensic work that includes chain-of-custody reporting both start from £800 + VAT. A Fusion Drive Mac (two devices, one volume) will be charged a flat rate of £550 + VAT. SAN & enterprise storage pricing starts from £1,250 + VAT, quoted shelf by shelf. Every figure is a starting point fixed in writing after the free diagnostic, never a surprise after it.
What files can be recovered from each type of device and what the starting price for recovering them is. All prices exclude VAT and are fixed in writing after the free diagnostic.
| Device | From | |
|---|---|---|
| Hard Drive | £300 | details → |
| SSD & NVMe | £300 | details → |
| External HDD | £300 | details → |
| USB Stick | £250 | details → |
| Memory Card | £250 | details → |
| Laptop & PC | £300 | details → |
| Mac & MacBook | £300 | details → |
| RAID Array | from £500 | details → |
| NAS | from £500 | details → |
| Server | from £500 | details → |
| Database | from £500 | details → |
| BitLocker | £800 | details → |
| CCTV / DVR / NVR | £400 | details → |
| Virtual Machine | from £800 | details → |
| Forensic | from £800 | details → |
| SAN | from £1,250 | details → |
A fixed £300 + VAT: internal or external, laptop or desktop, clicking or simply invisible. A free diagnostic first, the price confirmed in writing, and on most jobs nothing to pay unless the recovery is successful. Upon receiving a quote, post it from anywhere within the UK or bring it to Tay House on Bath Street.
This will also be a fixed price of £300 + VAT, which includes faulty bridge boards and faulty firmware commonly found on WD, Seagate, Buffalo and LaCie externals, where the casing has died as opposed to the disk (which is more likely than many believe).
We charge a flat fee of £300 + VAT, no matter what type of Mac or MacBook you have, if it has a removable drive. If your machine has a Fusion Drive (a single volume that uses two drives), the price will be a flat £550 + VAT. We do not recover storage soldered to the logic board on a machine. As soon as you get your free diagnostic, it will tell you so.
£300 + VAT is the cost for SATA, M.2, and NVMe SSD devices that are no longer functional. Dead controllers are also included in this total. All monoliths and all chip-off jobs fall under our exceptions category and we quote them first.
Starting from £500 + VAT, quoted to the job, depending on how many disks make up your RAID array or NAS and their condition: all disks are initially imaged one per disk, with the entire volume then being recreated in a virtual environment.
£250 + VAT for a USB stick and an SD/microSD/CF card. Any broken or damaged connector will be repaired as part of this service. A "format-me" error can also be fixed with this service. Chip-level monolith work is an exception to these prices. Each such request requires a written quote first.
BitLocker recovery costs are a fixed £800 + VAT, while CCTV, DVR & NVR recovery costs are a fixed £400 + VAT; virtual machines and forensic work cost from £800 + VAT, with SAN and enterprise storage from £1,250 + VAT. We will provide you with an exact written quote once we have completed your complimentary diagnostic.
Work on databases, done at a page-level basis, rebuilds of virtual machines, layer-by-layer, forensic instructions with reporting and chain-of-custody documentation, searches of wallets, batch destruction with certificates: all have scopes too different to be fairly priced as a single rate; therefore, each project will need to be individually scoped and quoted in writing after the completion of your no-cost assessment. Each has variable scope, yet consistent behaviour: the price of the project is determined before any work commences.
All prices include: the no charge diagnosis, the time and care to image, the actual recovery of your data, verification that we actually recovered your data, and returning your device with your files restored onto brand-new, encrypted storage devices. The priority handling of true emergency situations is the only service that requires extra payment: we will provide you both the premium rate along with our regular pricing to allow you to choose if you want to pay for this additional service or not.
This is because "from" does its job in this sentence very well. The £49 is the software model of their pricing, for a healthy drive; when the drive has real damage the cost is to be determined, at which point it will normally have climbed into three figures or even be quoted in thousands (the company retains possession of your device). A fixed band means the amount you plan to spend is the amount you will actually end up spending.
This is because price follows engineering effort, not size. A failing memory card can mean needing to read off the NAND, which on monoliths may involve using a microscope to find where the microscopic test points are and then attempting to rebuild your files from this raw dump. It takes many hours on the bench as well as use of special tools, regardless of capacity. So there should be some shock that we do complex work for a fixed £250 at all.
No. A quote is written and fixed prior to commencing any paid work; "to the job" refers to how that price is determined, not when you find out what it will be. Disk count, disk condition and rebuild difficulty are all factors in determining your quotation at the time of diagnosis. If the original scope significantly changes as the true nature of the disks becomes apparent after they have been imaged, you will be told this before any money has left your pocket.
The incentive is working opposite; we only get paid for success. Therefore hopeless-looking drives are getting a full method (donor parts, service area work, patient imaging) because that's what makes them stop being so hopeless. Paying only when we recover your data removes just one thing: our ability to charge you for a shrug.
£300 + VAT, fixed, for each job; this charge will apply to all failures no matter if they are internally mounted, externally mounted etc. All jobs have a free diagnostic service before we commit to recovering your files. On most jobs, only when your data has been successfully recovered do you need to pay the agreed price of £300 + VAT as per above. There is no extra charge for devices dropped off at Tay House or posted by you from anywhere within the United Kingdom.
£300 + VAT is our fixed price for recovering MacBook data from a drive that can be removed and £550 + VAT is our flat rate for machines equipped with a Fusion Drive. We do not undertake MacBook data recovery where the machine has its storage soldered into place; this type of MacBook model will be identified by the free diagnostic.
Yes, we provide a free assessment of the device (we don't charge for assessing it). Once assessed we will tell you exactly what is wrong with your device and explain what can be recovered (the good bits) and then give you a fixed price in writing for that recovery. If after this you decide not to go ahead, you pay no charges other than any cost to post back your device.
You are paying for everything that software can't provide: matched donor parts for your exact hard drive model, a hardware image of your failed media (since we need to be gentle), and access to firmware that no consumer product provides, and in most cases, you will only pay for our service if we successfully recover your data, which the software doesn't promise. For example, when you have a fully functional hard drive the commercial tool is perfectly fine, but when you have a failing one it's often the most expensive thing you can run.
Send us a message via our contact form or call us for a quote. Then send or bring the unit to us. After receiving the unit, we'll complete the free diagnostic. Your written price will typically be provided after completing the diagnostic, within a working day of arrival. Data recovery cost in Glasgow, explained prior to billing: that's our entire policy.