The Cradle of the Royal Stewarts sits closer to our counter than most of Glasgow does — fifteen minutes over the water. When a drive fails in Renfrew, the temptation to keep testing it is the only thing standing between you and a free answer.
From Renfrew it’s onto the M8 at junction 26 and straight across to Charing Cross — fifteen minutes, most days, door to counter. No station in the town itself, but the bus corridor into the city is constant, and the post remains the universal equaliser: insured, tracked, padded, and on the bench next morning.
Renfrew’s casework carries the airport-and-industry flavour of the riverside: business laptops and site machines from the trading estates, drone and travel footage on memory cards, and the home drives holding everything the family never quite backed up. Short journey, same standard: image first, fix on the copy.
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.
Easily — Tay House is two minutes off the M8 at Charing Cross, and the counter is open Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm, no appointment. Have the drive powered off and padded in the car rather than loose in a door pocket; vibration is nobody’s friend.
Often it’s the moment weak hardware finally shows itself under sustained load, and the interrupted write can bruise the file system too — two layers, both routine. What matters now is that the backup attempt stops being retried; bring it in and the free diagnostic will separate the layers honestly.
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 Renfrew. 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.