Bishopbriggs runs on the rhythm of the city without living in it — and when a household or home-office drive breaks that rhythm, the fix is a fifteen-minute errand rather than an ordeal. Power it down first; that’s the whole trick.
Few of our towns have a simpler route: the A803 runs directly into the city, fifteen minutes to Charing Cross outside the rush, and Bishopbriggs station is a short hop into Queen Street with Bath Street minutes beyond. The postal route needs no introduction by now — insured, tracked, padded, and in the same morning queue as everything else.
The casework here is the commuter-town classic: the family laptop that holds the admin and the photographs alike, home-office machines doing real business, SD cards from holidays and touchlines, and the external that was “the backup” right up until it wasn’t. Each one: imaged once, gently, then everything on the copy.
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.
Drop before work, absolutely — the counter opens at 9am. Same-day recovery is rarer than folklore suggests, though: most single-drive jobs run three to five working days because gentle imaging takes the time it takes. The free diagnostic gives you an honest timeline before you commit.
It’s the perfect time — new noises are the early chapter, and drives caught there recover best and cheapest. Copy the truly irreplaceable off now in one calm pass, then get it assessed free. “Too early” is a category we’ve never once seen on the bench.
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 Bishopbriggs. 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.