New town on an old harbour, Irvine keeps its data the way it keeps everything — practically, and mostly on hardware bought to last. When a drive doesn’t, the coast-to-city run is forty minutes, and the first answer is free.
From Irvine the A78 and A71 feed the M77 north, and Charing Cross arrives in about forty minutes. Trains run from Irvine station direct to Glasgow Central along the Ayrshire coast line. Or skip the travel entirely: the insured, tracked parcel is Ayrshire’s most popular route to the bench, and it earns that quietly every week.
Irvine’s mix carries both eras of the town: business machines from the enterprise-area units, harbourside and Beach Park photography on cards, home-office laptops, and the NAS boxes small firms adopted as their “server”. Whatever the vintage, the discipline holds — imaged once, all repairs on the copy, nothing gambled.
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.
Perfectly, treated like the fragile parcel it is: powered off, wrapped against knocks, carried rather than crushed under a bag. The train’s vibration is trivial next to a single hopeful power-on. Or seal the same packaging and post it — identical outcome, zero platform time.
Use whoever earns it — but check what “closer” actually offers: many local options run software over sick drives or forward the hard cases elsewhere. Here the work is done in-house, start to finish, with a free diagnosis and a written fixed price. Distance is one post box; method is everything.
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 Irvine. 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.