Five bands, printed in full, and they read the same in Coventry as they do anywhere else with a postbox. Nearly everything that arrives falls into one of them, and which one your job lands in is confirmed in writing as soon as an engineer has had the hardware in front of them. VAT sits outside the band and is shown on its own line.
Finding out costs nothing. Not the wizard on this site and not the engineer's examination at Oxford. No invoice reaches you that you have not already read and agreed to.
The media and the fault decide which band a job lands in. Nothing else does. Nobody is asked what the files are worth before being told a figure, and no one has ever moved a number because a caller sounded like they were having a bad week. VAT is added to each band below and appears on the quote as a line of its own.
CFexpress, CompactFlash, SD and microSD, along with the keyring stick that has been through a wash cycle. Where the controller has stopped answering a reader, the flash behind it is read on its own terms rather than through the interface that failed.
Spinning or solid state, 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch, M.2 or NVMe, and capacity does not move the rung. Nor does the sum take any notice of what the disk was bolted into, so the same figure covers one out of a tower, one out of a laptop and one lifted from an external case.
A disk lifted out of a CCTV or DVR unit, with the hours that matter exported and documented instead of returned as a pile of proprietary files nobody can open. The same rung takes BitLocker and other encrypted volumes, provided the key still exists or the account holding it can be traced.
Servers, RAID sets, NAS units and SAN volumes. Before any stripe or parity sum is attempted each member is imaged in its own right, which is why the disk count is what lifts the figure — not the capacity of the set, and not how soon you want it back.
Work conducted and documented so that it survives being challenged by somebody who never saw the drive. Strip the written report away and what remains is a forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction, and that lands back on the £400 rung rather than opening a sixth one.
Five rungs, and the forensic image is not a sixth. An image taken with deleted-file extraction and no written report is £400 + VAT — the same £400 as a recorder disk, the same £400 as an encrypted volume. It shares a rung instead of inventing one, and a price list that counts a figure twice is padding itself out.
Follow your own media to its rung: hard drive, SSD and NVMe at £300 + VAT; memory card and USB stick at £250 + VAT; CCTV and DVR disks and BitLocker volumes at £400 + VAT; RAID, NAS, SAN and server sets from £500 + VAT; forensic casework with a report at £800 + VAT. Your own figure is settled by a free diagnostic and put in writing before a screw is turned.
Most pages about cost explain what pushes a job upwards. It is more useful to start with what cannot, because that is where this trade has earned its reputation.
Capacity. A 500 GB laptop disk and a 16 TB desktop unit are the same £300 + VAT. A larger disk does take longer to image, sometimes considerably longer, and that time is already inside the band rather than bolted onto the end of it. Nobody here has ever charged by the gigabyte, and no one is invited to guess how full a drive was before hearing a price.
How badly you need it. There is no urgent tier and no premium for a deadline. Jobs are worked in the order they are booked in, physical repairs take as long as donor stock and the bench allow, and being told a true date beats being sold a fast one. If a job genuinely cannot be finished in the time you have, that is said at the quote rather than discovered at the end.
What is on the media. A wedding, a dissertation, a company's ledgers and a folder of holiday photographs are priced identically, because the work of getting them back is identical. Nobody asks what the files mean to you before naming a figure, and the fact that this needs writing down at all says something about the industry it is written in.
Who is asking. A household, a sole trader and a firm with a finance department read the same list. There is no business rate and no consumer rate, and the quote does not change when a company name appears on the booking form.
What is left after all that is short. How many disks are involved — a single piece of media carries a flat figure, while a set is priced on the count, since every member needs its own copy taken before anybody can think about reassembling a volume. And whether the hardware failed or only the data did — a deletion, a format, a broken file system or a partition that stopped appearing is logical work on a healthy disk, while a drive that ticks, stalls or took a knock needs donor parts, filtered air and hours at the bench before the first sector is read. Two facts, both of which you can supply from where you are sitting.
Ring round on a Monday morning and you will meet the same three shapes of answer, none of which is dishonest and none of which tells you what you will pay.
A rate per gigabyte. It sounds precise and it measures the wrong thing. The labour in a recovery sits in the fault, not in the volume: a 200 GB partition table that has come apart is an afternoon, and 200 GB spread over four seized disks is a fortnight. Priced by the gigabyte, the easy job subsidises nothing and the hard one is unaffordable.
A bracket. Three hundred to twelve hundred pounds is not a price, it is a range wide enough to contain whatever the job turns out to cost. It has the useful property of never being wrong, and the awkward property of leaving you unable to decide anything until the work has already been done.
An opening figure with the word from in front of it. Perfectly fair on a multi-disk job, where the count genuinely is unknown until the box is opened, which is why arrays on this site are quoted from £500 + VAT. On a single drive it is doing something else: the number that gets you to send the parcel is not the number on the invoice.
The alternative used here is duller and easier to check. An engineer examines the media at no charge, and out of that comes one figure, fixed, in writing, before anything is opened. Approve it and the work starts. Decline it and the media is posted back. The figure invoiced afterwards is the figure you read, and that identity is the entire point of putting it in writing at the start.
Ransomware does not get a band of its own. An encrypted drive is £300 + VAT and an encrypted array or server is from £500 + VAT, which is what the same hardware would cost after any other fault. Calling it forensic work and charging £800 + VAT would be an invention. Nobody here pays or handles a ransom for you, and what is worked on instead is snapshots, shadow copies, remnants and everything the encryption run never got round to — ransomware recovery has the detail.
A single figure with no hourly rate behind it invites a reasonable question about what it is actually buying, so here is the bench's side of it.
The examination that produced the quote. Already paid for, whichever way you answer afterwards. On an awkward drive that can run into several hours before anybody knows what to write down.
Parts, including the ones that take longest to find. A donor mechanism matched on model, firmware revision and often factory of origin; a replacement board; an adaptor for a connector never designed to leave a machine. Locating a suitable donor is regularly more work than fitting it, and none of that hunting appears as a line on anything.
Bench time in filtered air. The enclosure itself, the tooling that lifts a head stack clear without letting it graze a platter, and as many attempts as a stubborn mechanism turns out to need. A first attempt that fails is not a second invoice.
Imaging, and the passes nobody plans for. Hardware built to read past a weak region, mark it and come back later rather than sit in front of it retrying until the heads give out. A tired surface can want several passes and the odd one wants dozens.
The rebuild and the proof. Directory trees put back together, every repair made to the copy and none of it to your disk, and a sample of genuine documents opened at the finish to prove they behave. Then fresh storage to carry the data home, since the failed drive is never written to at any point. What happens to your original afterwards is your decision in writing: returned to you, or securely destroyed.
Two things sit outside the figure and both are visible before you commit. Getting the parcel here is at your expense, because choosing between a tracked service and a cheap one is your call rather than ours. And VAT is added rather than absorbed, which is why the quote shows the recovery fee on one line and the tax on another. Nothing else is added at any point: no charge for looking, no fee for a summary of an ordinary recovery, and no gap at all between the number quoted and the number invoiced.
Before you send anything. The diagnostic wizard on this site asks a series of questions and no card details. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
While the media is on the bench. The engineer's examination is free as well, however many hours it absorbs. Two working days after your device is booked in the examination closes, and what it produces is a single number, fixed and written down.
If the answer is no. The media is packed up and posted back. No invoice is raised, and nothing has been charged for finding out where you stand.
If the answer is yes, and the fault was logical. No fix, no fee applies — deleted or formatted files, a corrupt file system, a partition that has vanished, a healthy disk a machine refuses to acknowledge. Nothing recovered means nothing payable.
If the answer is yes, and the work is physical. Five categories fall outside the guarantee and all five are named here rather than buried in a terms page: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. They run at 50% upfront, with the rest due once the files have been proved back. The reason is arithmetic and not caution. A matched donor, a head or motor transplant, board-level repair, chips lifted off a card, firmware surgery — every one of those spends money and bench hours before a single readable sector exists, and a laboratory pretending otherwise would only be recovering the cost through everybody else's invoice.
Forensic instructions are invoiced half at the start, like the rest of the excluded work. The purchase there is an examination and a document, not a folder of files, so the deliverable arrives whichever way the findings turn out. A full investigation written up runs to £800 + VAT. Where nobody needs a report, the forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction is £400 + VAT.
Then the timings. A single-drive recovery takes 2 to 4 working days from the moment you approve the figure. Clean-bench repairs and multi-disk sets run longer, and the quote says so at the time instead of leaving you to work it out. Work happens at Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP — about fifty-five miles from Coventry down the M40, roughly an hour, though almost everybody posts rather than drives.
Four jobs off this bench with the band each landed in and the terms attached to it. What differs between them is the hardware and the fault. The procedure never varies: examine at no charge, quote in writing, wait for a yes.
A sound disk with a file system wrecked by a power cut part way through a write. Logical work throughout, so £300 + VAT and no fix, no fee applying in full — had the project folders stayed lost, no invoice would have been raised.
A member dropped out in the spring and the alert landed in a mailbox nobody reads. A second went in August. Each of the four disks was imaged on its own and the volume rebuilt from the copies, with the originals left untouched throughout — from £500 + VAT, set by the member count.
A CFexpress card that mounted without complaint and showed an empty folder. Flash work at £250 + VAT, and one of the quicker jobs that week: the directory had been lost and the frames had not, so both cards from the Saturday came back whole.
DVR work sits outside no fix, no fee whatever prompted it, so the £400 + VAT was agreed before anything started. The relevant clips came out with their timestamps intact and documented to a standard an insurer could accept without argument.
The examination comes first and costs nothing, the fixed written number second, and the work only after you have agreed to it.
Very little of this work changes hands in person. It comes by post, which treats hardware that has already stopped behaving far better than a car journey does: padded, tracked and insured for the whole trip. Coventry to the Oxford bench is about fifty-five miles down the M40, roughly an hour, and a parcel handed over in Warwickshire this afternoon is normally booked in the next 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.