The town that launched the Queens and sewed half the world’s Singers knows precision engineering when it sees it — and knows that when a precision machine fails, you stop cranking the handle. Same rule for drives: power off, then twenty minutes east.
Clydebank to Charing Cross is one of the gentler runs — the A814 along the river or the Clydeside Expressway, twenty minutes door to door, with Tay House at the city end of Bath Street. The North Clyde line runs from Clydebank and Singer stations straight into the city. Post works the same as everywhere: insured, tracked, padded, powered off.
Shipyard-town data has range: CAD archives and works records from the remaining industry, college coursework, and the externals holding generations of family photographs from the tenement years to now. Whatever arrives from Clydebank gets imaged before it gets fixed — the yard rule, applied to platters: measure twice, cut once.
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.
Either — but do neither until it’s powered off for good; clicking is head damage and every restart scores the platters. Padded well, the post is genuinely safe. If you’re passing anyway, the counter at Tay House takes it over in two minutes.
Yes — age is not an obstacle, and Clydebank sends us plenty of it: IDE and early SATA drives from machines that outlived their software. Old interfaces, old file systems and old formats are all readable here, and the pricing band is the same £300 + VAT as a modern drive.
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 Clydebank. 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.