Burns country runs on more manuscripts than it used to — guest-house bookings, links-course photography, family archives — nearly all of it on a drive somewhere in Ayr. When one goes quiet, the A77 or a first-class box covers the distance; the free diagnosis covers the rest.
Ayr to Charing Cross is the A77 becoming the M77, fifty minutes on a clear run, with Tay House just off the motorway’s end. The rail option is direct and frequent: Ayr to Glasgow Central along the coast. At this range, though, the honest recommendation is often the post — insured, tracked, padded, and benched next morning while you keep your day.
Ayr’s casework has a seasonal pulse: hospitality machines heavy with bookings and accounts, race-day and golf-course photography by the cardful, retirement-project archives, and student laptops home from term. The season never changes the method — one gentle image, then everything on the copy, verified 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.
Gladly: a powered-off drive in two inches of padding, insured and tracked, has a gentler journey than any passenger seat, arrives next morning, and enters the identical queue. You keep two hours of your life; the drive keeps its platters undisturbed. It’s what most of Ayrshire chooses.
If the business is genuinely stopped, yes — call 0141 404 0294 and say so; the emergency track exists for revenue-down situations and runs evenings and weekends when justified. If bookings can limp along another way for a few days, the standard track gets the same result for less, and we’ll tell you which honestly.
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 Ayr. 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.