Scotland’s largest town has never needed Glasgow’s permission for much — but when a drive full of the family archive or the firm’s accounts stops answering, the ten-minute hop up the M8 is the shortest route in the country to a straight diagnosis and a fixed price.
From Paisley the maths barely counts as a journey: M8 to Charing Cross in around ten minutes, or Gilmour Street to Glasgow Central and a short walk up to Tay House on Bath Street. Too busy for either? Insured, tracked post from any Paisley post office lands next morning — and for a drive that’s clicking, the padded envelope is every bit as good as the passenger seat.
What comes in from Paisley looks like Paisley: dissertation laptops from the university, order books and CAD from the trading estates, and forty years of family photographs on externals that finally gave out. Mill-town practicality applies — nobody here wants drama, just the files back.
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 — the counter at Tay House takes walk-ins Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm, no appointment needed, and Paisley is genuinely the closest of all our towns. Power the drive down first and bring it as it is; the free diagnostic usually starts the same day.
Sensibly packed, yes — a powered-off drive tolerates the mail far better than it tolerates being retried. Wrap it in two inches of padding, use an insured tracked service, and include your name and number. Hundreds of drives arrive that way; the couriers have never been our problem.
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 Paisley. 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.