Doonhamers are eighty road-miles from our counter, which sounds like a disadvantage until you notice the mail covers it overnight for the price of a coffee. From Dumfries, data recovery is a packing job: power off, pad well, post insured — and let the free diagnosis meet the parcel.
The drive up is the A701 or A76 to the M74 and in — a solid hour and three quarters, lovely and long. The train runs Dumfries to Glasgow Central via Kilmarnock in similar time. Which is why the south-west’s standard route is the padded, insured, tracked parcel: posted from Dumfries by afternoon, on the bench next morning, no windscreen time spent.
Dumfries and Galloway sends the countryside’s full range: farm-office machines with subsidy records and stock books, tourism and photography businesses with seasons on their cards, town-firm servers, and family archives from houses with real history in the lofts. Distance is invisible on the bench — same free look, same written figure, same no-fix-no-fee.
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 — tracked services from Dumfries land with us next working morning as dependably as parcels from Paisley, and a powered-off drive is a robust traveller when padded properly. Photograph the packed box, keep the tracking number, and the distance stops being a factor at the post-office counter.
You’d owe the return postage and nothing else — the diagnostic is free and no-fix-no-fee covers most single-device jobs, so an unrecoverable drive costs you two parcels, not a bill. We’ll also tell you the realistic odds after the free look, before you decide anything at all.
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 Dumfries. 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.