From Stornoway to Stranraer, Shetland to the Borders, the geography of data recovery in Scotland flattens to one honest fact: a powered-off drive travels beautifully. Post it insured from any corner of the country and it’s on the bench in Glasgow next morning — diagnosed free, quoted in writing, and recovered without ever leaving the UK.
The route map is short. If you’re in the west — Glasgow, Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, the Clyde towns — the counter at Tay House, 300 Bath Street takes walk-ins Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Everyone else uses the route that makes distance irrelevant: Royal Mail Special Delivery or any insured, tracked courier of your choosing, posted from Inverness or Lerwick or Kelso by afternoon, with us next working morning.
The islands deserve their own sentence, because islanders always ask: yes, tracked services from Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides work exactly as well — a day longer in transit sometimes, never a day riskier. A drive that’s powered off and padded in two inches of wrap doesn’t know if it’s crossing the Minch or the M8. What ages drives isn’t miles; it’s power-ons — so the safest thing any Scot can do with a failing disk is switch it off and let the mail do the travelling.
What comes in reads like the country itself: croft-office laptops with the subsidy records, fishing and marine businesses with seasons of paperwork, Highland tourism operators with terabytes of scenery, distillery and estate archives, university machines from all four ancient seats, and family externals from Wick to Wigtown holding photographs nothing could replace. Everything is worked in-house in the UK by our own engineers — never outsourced, never sent abroad — with the same terms whatever the postmark.
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.
Usually, yes — twice over. The parcel itself is the safe part: powered off and padded, a drive rides Special Delivery from Inverness or Ullapool untroubled. The risk sits with “local” options that run software over sick hardware or quietly forward the difficult jobs elsewhere. Post it once, to where the work actually happens.
Neither — the bands are the bands (£250 cards, £300 single drives, from £500 multi-disk, all + VAT) and no-fix-no-fee holds whatever the postcode. Island parcels sometimes take an extra transit day; they arrive in exactly the same condition. Insure and track it, tuck your name and number inside, and geography is done.
It never leaves the UK — that’s a hard commitment, and one worth demanding from anyone in this trade. Recovery happens in-house by our own engineers with a documented chain of custody; nothing is subcontracted abroad or “escalated” to partner labs overseas. Your drive comes to one bench and goes home from the same one.
And wherever in Scotland the drive starts from, the numbers don’t move: data recovery cost is fixed in writing after the free look — £300 + VAT for single drives, from £500 for arrays — before anything is attempted.
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 Scotland. 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.