A working laboratory rather than a shop front, taking drives, cards, sticks and arrays by post from every part of the UK. This page sets out what the service actually does, what each of the five bands costs, how a postal recovery works when there is nothing useful near you, and why the distance to the bench matters far less than what happens to the device in the first hour after it fails.
Five bands, all fixed in writing: £250 + VAT flash media, £300 + VAT a hard drive or SSD, £400 + VAT a recorder or encrypted drive, from £500 + VAT an array, £800 + VAT full forensic work. The diagnostic that produces your figure is free and closes two working days after booking in.
The phrase covers six fairly different pieces of work, and the difference decides the price, the odds and how long you wait. Almost every enquiry that comes in belongs to one of them.
Heads that have stopped flying, a spindle that will not turn, a platter surface that has been scored. This is the work that needs filtered air, a donor drive of the right family and a good deal of patience. It is also the work where continuing to power the drive up at home does measurable harm, because every spin-up drags failing heads across the surface you want read.
A shorted board, a burnt fuse after a bad power supply, a controller that no longer answers. The platters are usually pristine. The catch is that a modern board carries drive-specific tuning in its own chip, so a swapped board on its own generally achieves nothing; that adaptive data has to move across with it.
Deleted folders, a quick format, a partition that vanished, a file system left inconsistent by a power cut, a volume that suddenly wants formatting. The hardware reads perfectly and the work happens entirely on an image of it. This is the category that no fix, no fee was written for, and it is the largest one.
Cards, sticks and pen drives fail as a controller rather than as a mechanism, which is why they die without warning and without noise. Some are readable through the normal interface once the controller is coaxed back, and some need the memory addressing worked out from scratch. Wear levelling means the contents are never in the order the file system thinks.
RAID sets, NAS boxes, SANs and the disks out of a server. Each member is imaged separately, the layout is worked out from what is written on the disks rather than from the controller, and the volume is rebuilt off-line on copies. Nothing is written back to your originals at any stage.
Deleted-file extraction, a timeline of what was copied and when, a report an employment tribunal or a solicitor can rely on. This is a slower, documented process with continuity of handling recorded from the moment the media is booked in, and it is priced apart from ordinary recovery for that reason.
A data recovery service is not a repair shop and it is worth being clear about that at the start. Nothing that comes in here is mended and sent back working. The object is to get the contents off, onto fresh storage, and back to you; whatever the original device does afterwards is beside the point and it is normally scrap. Every decision on the bench follows from that, and it explains why the advice is so often to stop and do nothing rather than to try one more thing.
A job runs in four stages. First the media is booked in, photographed and given a reference. Second it is assessed: the drive is put on a controller that can talk to it at a low level without a host operating system trying to mount, repair or index it, and the assessment establishes what has actually failed rather than what the symptoms suggested. That assessment is the free diagnostic, and it closes two working days after the media is logged in.
Third, once you have agreed the written figure, the media is imaged. Sector by sector, a copy is taken, with the awkward regions left until the readable bulk is safely captured, and every subsequent operation happens against that copy. Your original is not written to, repaired or experimented on. Fourth, the file system is rebuilt from the image, the files are pulled out, and you are sent a listing of what came back so you can look for the things that mattered before anything is shipped.
The searches that bring people to this page are usually typed in a hurry and they all say the same thing: a data recovery service near me, a hard drive recovery service near me, hard drive data recovery services near me. The instinct behind the phrasing is sound — something valuable has broken, and standing in front of a human being feels safer than posting it to strangers. In practice geography is close to the least important variable in the whole job.
What actually decides the outcome is whether the failing device was switched off early, whether anything was written to it afterwards, and whether the work is done against an image or against the original. None of those depend on how far away the bench is. A drive posted from Newcastle on Tuesday afternoon and imaged on Wednesday morning has a better chance than the same drive carried round Coventry in a laptop bag for a fortnight while somebody tried recovery software on it.
The other half of it is that most high-street shops offering data recovery are not doing the work. They take the drive over the counter, put it in a jiffy bag and post it to a laboratory, then add their margin and their handling time to what comes back. You have still had a postal recovery. You have simply paid for a middleman and lost two or three days to the extra hops. Sending it directly removes both.
This site is run from one bench. There is no shop in Coventry, no counter to walk into, no engineer in a van and no collection service, and any page that tells you otherwise about a national data recovery service is describing a sales office rather than a laboratory. What exists is a working clean-air bench at Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House on the Oxford Science Park, where the drives are opened and imaged, and a freephone number answered by somebody who has seen the inside of one.
Drop-offs are welcome at that address between 9:00am and 5:30pm on weekdays if you would rather hand it over, and from Coventry it is about fifty-five miles down the M40, an hour in reasonable traffic. Most people post it, because a padded box is genuinely kinder to a sick drive than an hour in a car boot, and because a courier does not need the afternoon off work.
Five bands cover everything, and every one of them is a fixed figure quoted in writing before any work starts rather than an hourly rate or a range that drifts upward as the job goes on.
Flash media — a memory card of any size, a USB stick, a pen drive — is £250 + VAT. One hard drive or one SSD, internal or in an external case, is £300 + VAT. A drive out of a CCTV or DVR recorder is £400 + VAT, and so is any drive with BitLocker or another full-disk encryption on it, because both carry work an ordinary drive does not. Anything with more than one disk in it — a RAID set, a NAS, a SAN, the drives out of a server — starts at £500 + VAT and climbs with the number of members, since each one is imaged separately before the array can be reassembled.
Forensic work is the fifth band and it is quoted two ways. A full investigation with a written report suitable for a court or a tribunal is £800 + VAT. If you need the technical part only — a binary image of the media with deleted files extracted, and no report — that is £400 + VAT, the same figure as the recorder band rather than a separate tier of its own.
Ransomware is charged as ordinary media, which surprises people who have been quoted five figures elsewhere. An encrypted single drive is £300 + VAT and an encrypted array is from £500 + VAT. It is not forensic work, it is not priced as forensic work, and no ransom is ever paid or brokered on your behalf.
The diagnostic is free and closes two working days after the media is booked in. It produces a fixed price and a realistic completion date, and nothing further happens until you have said yes to both in writing. From that point a single drive or a single card is typically done inside two to four working days. Arrays and servers take longer, for the plain reason that four disks are four imaging runs before the interesting part can even begin.
If a job is going to slip, you are told while it is slipping rather than afterwards. A drive that needs a donor of an exact family and firmware revision occasionally waits on parts, and that is worth saying at the outset because a laboratory promising every recovery in twenty-four hours is quoting a marketing target rather than a bench schedule.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. Deleted files, formatted volumes, corrupt file systems, lost partitions, failed arrays whose disks are healthy, ransomware — if nothing usable comes back from one of those, there is nothing to pay.
The exclusions are published rather than buried: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. Those five sit outside the guarantee because they consume donor parts, bench hours and consumables whatever the result. Physical work also takes fifty per cent of the quoted figure upfront, with the balance due when the files are ready to send. There is no charge for the diagnostic in any category, so nobody pays anything to find out where they stand.
The rule is that the storage travels and the machine stays at home. Take the drive out of the laptop, the tower, the iMac or the recorder under the shop counter and send that alone; a local repair shop will free one in ten minutes if you would rather not. Three situations run the other way. An external drive stays sealed in its own enclosure and travels as it is. A NAS travels whole, disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each one labelled so the pair can be matched up again.
RAID sets and servers are the exception to the exception: send the member disks only, not the chassis and not the controller, and write the bay number on each disk before it comes out. A photograph of the front of the unit takes ten seconds and occasionally saves a day.
Two things cannot be taken at all. Phones and tablets are not handled here in any form. Neither is storage soldered flat to a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and many thin laptops are now built — if the memory will not unbolt from the board, there is no parcel to send and no honest way to charge for trying.
Tell us what the device is and how it went wrong, and you get a written figure and a realistic date before a penny is spent.
Parcels are how nearly all of this work arrives, and they come from a good deal further afield than Warwickshire. Padding and a tracked label treat a poorly drive better than a week of being carried about, and a box handed to a courier on a weekday afternoon usually reaches the Oxford bench in the 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.