The town that raised John Logie Baird has a fair claim on caring about signals and screens — and about what happens when they go dark. From Helensburgh, a failed drive is forty-five minutes or one first-class parcel away from a free, honest diagnosis.
By road it’s the A814 to Dumbarton and the A82 in — forty-five minutes of decent scenery to Charing Cross. Helensburgh Central runs direct trains to Queen Street, an easy carry for a padded drive. Given the distance, plenty here simply post: insured, tracked, powered off, on the bench next morning regardless of the weather on the water.
Helensburgh’s jobs have a coastal-professional flavour: home-office Macs and laptops from the commuter contingent, sailing-season photography, family archives in seafront flats, and the occasional small-business NAS. Distance changes nothing about the terms — free diagnostic, fixed written figure, no recovery no fee on most jobs.
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.
Only if the trip suits you anyway — the bench treats a posted drive and a hand-delivered one identically, and the mail is kinder than the A814’s bends to anything fragile. The honest advice for Helensburgh: pack it properly, post it insured, and spend the saved hours by the water.
Genuinely good — a dead Mac is usually a dead machine around living storage, whichever era it is: removable drive or Fusion pair; soldered Apple Silicon machines aren’t work we take on, and the assessment says so straight away. Stop the restart attempts, take the drive — or the Fusion pair — out (a local shop will do it in minutes) and send the drives themselves; the free assessment tells you which era’s job it is.
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 Helensburgh. 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.