The Southside’s unofficial capital runs on laptops in café windows and archives in tenement flats — and when one of those drives goes quiet, the fix is fifteen minutes over the river. Power it down first; the coffee can wait, the platters can’t.
Shawlands station runs straight into Glasgow Central on the Cathcart Circle, and Bath Street is a short walk up from there — door to counter in twenty minutes without touching a car. Driving, it’s Pollokshaws Road or the M77’s first junctions, fifteen minutes to Charing Cross outside the rush. And G41’s post offices make the parcel route as easy here as anywhere: insured, tracked, next morning on the bench.
Southside casework has its own texture: freelance and creative machines from the café-office economy, tenement photo archives spanning four generations of the same close, small-shop tills and back-office PCs from Kilmarnock Road, and the student laptops of the flats between the parks. All of it gets the same order: imaged once, gently, then every repair 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.
Fast — drop it powered-off at Tay House and the free diagnostic typically runs within a working day, with the written figure straight after. The data almost always outlives the machine; what shortens the odds is a week of hopeful restarts first, so stop those today.
No — honestly, one counter is how the chain of custody stays short and the work stays in-house. From Shawlands that counter is a fifteen-minute hop: Tay House, 300 Bath Street, Monday to Friday 9am–5:30pm, no appointment. Or skip the trip entirely and post it insured.
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 Shawlands. 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.