Airdrie sits at the eastern edge of the conurbation with its own way of doing things — and its own share of drives holding payroll, coursework and twenty years of photographs. When one stops, the route west is easy and the first answer costs nothing.
The road run is the A89 to the M8 and west to Charing Cross — half an hour, give or take the Baillieston merge. Airdrie station runs frequent direct trains through the city, a fine way to carry a padded, powered-off drive. And the post office route works precisely as it does everywhere: insured, tracked, next morning in the queue.
What arrives from Airdrie is working-town data: van-office laptops with the year’s invoices, the family PC that quietly became the archive, SD cards from pitches and prams alike, and small-firm NAS boxes that blinked red one Monday. The treatment never varies — imaged first, fixed on the copy, checked before return.
Whatever arrives, the terms don’t move with the postcode: a free diagnostic first, a fixed figure in writing before any work — £250 + VAT for cards and sticks, £300 + VAT for any single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — and on most jobs, no recovery means no fee. Every job is handled in-house by our own engineers and your data never leaves the UK.
Only if it gets “tested” over it — powered off in a drawer, a drive loses nothing between Friday and Monday. Post it Saturday morning or drop it Monday; if it’s a genuine business-down emergency, the priority line takes weekend messages and calls back fast.
Just the drive does fine — though for externals, sending the whole unit with its own cable helps us test the enclosure too, since the case is a suspect as often as the disk. No paperwork needed beyond your name and number tucked inside the padding.
Power it down, pad it well, and choose your route — the counter at Tay House, 300 Bath Street (Mon–Fri 9am–5:30pm) or insured, tracked post from Airdrie. Either way it’s diagnosed free and quoted in writing before anything is decided.
All data recovery services — diagnosis, imaging and recovery — happen at our Glasgow lab, whichever town the job starts in.
Stop using the drive. Every further read or write risks overwriting what is still recoverable, and on a failing mechanism it risks the heads touching the platters. If the machine is still on, shut it down properly and leave it off.
Don't run recovery software on the original. Consumer tools write their own index files to the disk they are scanning. On a healthy drive with deleted files that is often survivable; on a drive with bad sectors or a mechanical fault it turns a good outcome into a partial one.
Don't open the drive. A hard disk opened outside a filtered-air bench collects particles that score the platters within a few rotations. If it has already been opened, tell us — it changes the approach, not the willingness.
Remove the drive where you can. Please send the hard drive or SSD on its own; we are not able to accept complete laptops or desktop systems. Any computer shop will take it out in minutes. External drives are the exception — send those complete with the enclosure, because on many models the bridge board holds the encryption key and a bare disk reads as unformatted.
The diagnostic is free and it is a real one. The drive goes on the bench, not through a script: we identify the fault class, check whether the media is stable enough to image, and establish what is realistically recoverable before anyone talks about money.
Then you get a fixed figure in writing. Not a range, not an estimate that moves once work starts. You decide with the number in front of you, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay if the recovery does not succeed.
We image first, then work on the copy. The original is read once, as gently as the hardware allows, and every repair happens on that image. It is the difference between one careful attempt and a drive that degrades with each pass.
Everything is done in-house. Your drive is not couriered on to a partner laboratory, and your data does not leave the UK. When the recovery is complete you get a file listing to check before anything is returned, and the copy on our systems is securely wiped 30 days after you confirm you have it.