The Romans built a wall through Bearsden; residents since have mostly built photo libraries and practice records. When the drive holding either goes quiet, the journey to a straight answer is twenty minutes — shorter than the school run, and considerably calmer.
Bearsden to Bath Street is a simple run — down through Maryhill or via the A739 Switchback, twenty minutes on a fair day — and the Milngavie line puts Bearsden and Hillfoot stations a direct ride from Queen Street. The post-in route suits the diary-driven perfectly: insured, tracked, powered off, padded, next morning on the bench.
Bearsden’s drives skew personal and professional in the same household: the MacBooks and iMacs of home-working professionals, practice and consultancy records, and decades of family photography that migrated from albums to a single external nobody duplicated. Discreet handling is standard; so is the free diagnosis before any figure is discussed.
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.
Yes — spinning-drive iMacs, MacBook drives and Fusion machines each get their own method at flat prices. The honest exception: soldered-storage Macs (the T2 and Apple Silicon era) aren’t work we take on, and the free assessment says so straight away. Stop the restart attempts; they cost a failing drive plenty.
As the default, not an extra: work happens in-house by our own engineers, nothing is outsourced, media is stored securely, and your data never leaves the UK. If your professional obligations need an NDA on file, say so at drop-off — it’s signed without ceremony.
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 Bearsden. 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.