Under the Rock, data loss looks the same as everywhere else — a drive that clicked once and went quiet, a laptop that won’t wake, a card the camera suddenly can’t read. The difference Dumbarton enjoys is a genuinely pleasant route to the fix.
The drive in follows the river — A82 to the Expressway, thirty to thirty-five minutes to Charing Cross on a fair run. Dumbarton Central and East stations put you on the North Clyde line straight into the city. And for the no-journey option, the padded insured parcel from any Dumbarton counter joins the next morning’s queue like everything else.
Vale-and-Rock casework spans the area’s character: distillery-and-industry business machines, tourism-season photography by the terabyte, school and college laptops, and household externals holding every picture since film ran out. The method is constant whatever arrives — one careful image, then all work 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.
Neither should “try software” on it — each mount attempt on a corrupt card risks frames. Stop shooting on it, cap it, and send or bring it as-is; cards are £250 + VAT with the same free-look-first terms, and shoot recovery is carved frame by frame from an image.
We’ve yet to meet it in the wild — IDE relics, laptop drives from defunct brands, early externals with forgotten connectors: the bench keeps the adapters and the patience. Old media often reads beautifully once handled correctly; bring what you have and let the free diagnostic say.
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 Dumbarton. 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.