Partick barely needs a journey at all — the bench is ten minutes away for half the West End, and closer than the big supermarket for the rest. Students, medics, academics and everyone above a Dumbarton Road close: your failed drive’s commute is shorter than yours.
Partick Interchange makes this the best-connected page on the site — the Subway or the North Clyde line into town, buses down Dumbarton Road every breath, or a brisk walk along Argyle Street through Finnieston to Charing Cross. Tay House sits at 300 Bath Street, counter open Monday to Friday 9am–5:30pm. Posting from G11 feels almost decadent, but it works too.
West End casework is its own genre: thesis laptops at the worst possible moment, research data and clinical-adjacent machines handled with appropriate discretion, creative portfolios on ageing externals, and tenement-flat photo archives. University-quarter pressure is familiar here — deadlines are named at drop-off and taken seriously.
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 — and this exact emergency walks in every term. The data usually outlives the laptop, deadlines qualify for the priority track when they’re genuinely tight, and the free diagnostic same-day tells you where you stand. What kills theses is the week of DIY attempts first — skip that chapter.
Completely — the counter at Tay House works on turn-up terms, Monday to Friday 9am–5:30pm. Bring the device powered off; drop-off takes a couple of minutes, the diagnostic is free, and you’ll get the written figure before anything is decided.
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 Partick. 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.