There is one freephone line and one mailbox, and the people on both are the people who do the recoveries. Say what the hardware is and what it started doing, and before the working day is out you will know what is likely to come back, which of the five bands the job belongs to, and how to get the media to Oxford without adding to the damage on the way. 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
Asking costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Money comes up once, when a written figure is in front of you and you have said yes to it.
Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Free from mobiles as well as landlines, and picked up by people whose entire week is failed storage.
There is no Coventry shopfront, and there is no collection service. Nobody drives out to fetch a drive, here or anywhere else on this network. What exists instead: tracked and insured postage to the address below, a courier you book yourself, or the counter at Oxford reception, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, for anyone who would rather hand the thing over in person. That drive is roughly fifty-five miles, the M40 south, about an hour in the car.
Oxford Data Recovery
John Eccles HouseWrite Oxford Data Recovery on the label, and drop a slip inside the box with your own name and a mobile number on it.
Still bolted into a laptop, a tower, an iMac, a MacBook, a server or a recorder? The drive comes out first and travels alone. Two things go whole instead: an external drive inside its own enclosure, and a NAS with its disks left in the bays. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each one labelled. Flash soldered to a mainboard cannot be helped by anybody. No mobile phones and no tablets.
Rather type it out? support@oxford-datarecovery.co.uk takes both forms on this site and the engineers read it themselves. No marketing desk sits in the middle of it.
Two PDFs travel with a parcel. Fill in the booking-in sheet and sit it on top of the padding, where reception will find it first: it is the reason a device carries a job number within minutes of the box being cut open.
↓ Shipping and booking-in sheet (PDF)
↓ Terms and conditions (PDF)
Two minutes on the free online diagnostic produces a reading. Hardware, badge, symptom, and then the fault that combination usually proves to be, the one thing worth doing today, and the band it falls into — all while the device is still on your desk.
Has a server, a RAID set or a NAS stopped you trading? Say so on the telephone. The job is flagged before the box turns up and its examination moves up the bench queue. Urgency does not move the band: £300 + VAT one drive or SSD, arrays from £500 + VAT.
Four boxes and somebody rings you. Put the hardware and the symptom in the last one; no need to be formal about it.
Somebody will ring before the working day is out (Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm). If it truly cannot wait, the freephone line is quicker: 0800 689 0668.
None of this is meant to be a mystery. Every stage a job goes through is set out below in order, with the two points where the choice belongs entirely to you marked as such.
Ring, fill in a form, or write. Three facts do it: the hardware, the behaviour, and roughly when it began. Two sentences are plenty.
Back the same working day. The probable fault, which of the five bands it falls in, and a straight answer on whether the postage is worth spending.
Out of the laptop, the tower, the iMac or the recorder, because only the storage travels. Two exceptions: an external drive keeps its own case, a NAS goes whole.
Antistatic bag or bubble wrap against the device, then a carton rigid enough that nothing moves when you tilt it. Leads, docks and power bricks stay with you.
Tracked and insured postage, a courier of your own, or across the counter at Oxford reception, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Nobody is coming out to fetch it.
Reception opens the box, writes a job number against the device and messages you to say it landed. From then on it is in the laboratory, not on a desk.
Two working days after arrival and no sooner. Electronics, mechanics, firmware, readable surface and file system are each judged in turn, and one fixed figure falls out.
Agree it and the recovery starts. Refuse it and the media goes back in the post. Getting this far costs nothing, and an agreed figure does not move afterwards.
Only two things move the figure: the class of media on the bench and the nature of the failure inside it. Urgency on the telephone moves nothing. Neither does what the files happen to be worth to you — pricing off the value of the contents is the oldest trick in this trade, and it is not practised here.
Five figures, and the list ends there. The middle one serves three unlike jobs rather than dividing into three, which is why an image without a report costs what a recorder disk costs instead of opening a tier of its own. Nothing else is billed, no second rate appears halfway through, and the band your media lands in is decided by what it is, not by how the week has been going.
Ransomware is where people expect an exception and there is not one. Hardware sets the band; the alarm around the incident sets nothing. One encrypted drive is £300 + VAT, and a server, a NAS or an array starts at £500 + VAT. No ransom is ever paid on anybody's behalf.
VAT goes on each line and appears as its own entry on the quote rather than being folded into the figure. Carriage is whatever you buy in either direction, and the encrypted drive your files travel home on is included.
That leaves the question of who carries the risk. Logical recoveries are no fix, no fee — a deleted folder, a format nobody meant to run, a file system in pieces, sound hardware the machine declines to acknowledge — and where one of those comes back empty, no invoice follows. Four exclusions are named and there are no others: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs, forensic jobs. Physical work takes 50% upfront, because donor parts are bought and clean-bench hours spent whatever the platters do next, and the balance is only due once the files are back with you. Which footing your job is on is printed on the quote itself, and the data recovery cost page explains what sits behind each band.
Almost everything worked on here arrived in the post. A drive that is already in trouble has an easier time boxed, padded and insured than it does being carried round in a bag for an afternoon, and a parcel handed over in Coventry today is normally booked in at Oxford tomorrow morning.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.
Two minutes on the wizard gives you a reading on the fault, the band it falls in and whether posting the device is worth your time.