FAQ & pricing: the numbers, before the work.

Three fixed bands cover nearly everything: £250 + VAT for memory cards and USB sticks, £300 + VAT for any single drive — hard drive, SSD, laptop or Mac — and from £500 + VAT for multi-disk systems like RAID, NAS and servers, quoted to the job. Databases, virtual machines, forensic work and wallet cases are quoted individually. Every figure goes in writing before work starts.

Genuinely free, no catch and no obligation: we assess the device, tell you what failed, what’s recoverable and the fixed price to proceed. If you decline, you owe nothing beyond return postage if we’re posting it back. The diagnostic is how we quote honestly — guessing over the phone helps nobody.

On most jobs, if we can’t recover the data you asked for, you don’t pay the recovery fee — simple as that. The exceptions are the genuinely open-ended categories (some forensic, wallet-search and quoted-to-job work) where effort is the product; those are scoped in writing first so you always know which terms apply before committing.

Most single-drive jobs run three to five working days from arrival, gentle imaging included. Multi-disk arrays take longer because every member is imaged individually. Where a matched donor part must be sourced, we’ll say so at diagnosis. Genuine emergencies can use the priority track — evenings and weekends — quoted alongside the standard figure.

No — honestly, phone and tablet recovery is a different discipline with different tooling, and we’d rather say so than dabble with your only copy. We focus on what we’re genuinely expert in: drives, SSDs, RAID and NAS systems, memory cards, USB sticks and the machines around them. For handsets, seek a dedicated mobile specialist.

No — we’re a recovery bench, not an IT provider, and we stay in our lane deliberately. What we will do, gladly and free, is tell you after your recovery exactly what arrangement would have prevented it, so whoever manages your IT can build it. Prevention advice: free. Ongoing backup services: not us.

Neither — and it’s policy, not laziness. A failing drive is safest making one padded journey, and recovery needs the imaging hardware, donor stock and laminar-flow hood that live on the bench. Bring it to Tay House, 300 Bath Street (Mon–Fri 9am–5:30pm) or send it by insured, tracked post from anywhere in the UK.

Our own engineers, in-house, and nobody else: no outsourcing, no partner labs, no overseas “escalation”. Media is stored securely with a documented chain of custody, recoveries are returned on encrypted media, and your data never leaves the UK. NDAs are signed on request as part of the job. We’re registered with the ICO (ZC173784).

Donor parts are matched to your exact model to make one good read possible — the drive is revived for imaging, not returned to service. Your original always comes back to you unless you ask us to destroy it securely, and recovered data is delivered on new encrypted media, checked before it ships.

Because the market has two ends we refuse: the £49 “recovery” that runs software over failing hardware, and the open-ended evaluation-fee model where the price appears after your drive is hostage. Fixed bands, free diagnosis, written figures: you can judge the value before anyone touches a screw.