Atherstone and Nuneaton at the top of the county with Bedworth below them, Solihull on the western edge, Rugby away to the east, and Kenilworth, Warwick, Leamington Spa, Southam and Stratford-upon-Avon spread around the south. The whole county sends its failed storage to a single bench in Oxford, and the stage at which an engineer establishes what has gone wrong is the stage nobody is charged for.
No postcode has ever altered a figure. £300 + VAT covers a drive or an SSD and arrays open at £500 + VAT, with your own number in writing 2 working days after the parcel is booked in.
The county makes its money in a handful of distinct ways and the postbag tracks them closely. Six patterns cover most of an ordinary week here, and each is priced straight off the bands published on this site.
Jaguar Land Rover at Whitley and Gaydon anchors a long supplier list, and design work, test data and measurement runs sit on workstations and small NAS boxes all along it. One disk is £300 + VAT; a set is from £500 + VAT, counted by member.
The distribution parks at Ansty and Ryton and the yards strung along both motorways. Pick lists, stock counts and delivery records held on a single server, where a stalled array stops the loading bay as well as the paperwork.
Plant records, drawings, test results and years of site photography, generally on one office machine with an external drive beside it that was last plugged in some time ago. Recorder disks from the yards are £400 + VAT.
The games and design cluster around Leamington Spa fills disks faster than anywhere else in the county — project files, render caches, build servers and scratch volumes that were never meant to be the only copy and quietly became it.
Hotels, letting agents, tour operators, and the wedding and event photographers who work a full summer calendar. Nobody empties a card as fast as a season fills it, and flash work of every kind is £250 + VAT.
Small manufacturers, fabricators, hauliers and trades in the old mining belt north of the city. Usually one office PC and one external drive holding the only copy of the accounts, the drawings and thirty years of photographs.
Every town below has a page of its own with local detail on it. The ring starts at Atherstone and Nuneaton in the north, comes down through Bedworth to Solihull in the west, runs east to Rugby, then south through Kenilworth, Warwick and Leamington Spa to Southam and Stratford-upon-Avon. The city keeps the front page to itself. Smaller places belong to whichever town on this list is closest, and not one part of the service changes with the postcode a parcel was handed over in.
CV10 and CV11, the largest town in the county and the head of the old coalfield. Light engineering, fabrication and one-office businesses, where a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT.
CV12, between Nuneaton and the city with the M6 at Junction 3 alongside. Small manufacturers, care providers and trades, plus the household drives holding the only copy of the photographs.
CV21 to CV23. Cement, heavy engineering and a rail town's worth of records: plant data, drawings, site photography and the recorder disks that follow a break-in at £400 + VAT.
CV31 and CV32. Regency terraces with a games and software cluster behind them, so project drives, render caches and NAS boxes worked hard every day of the week.
CV34, the county town. Legal and professional practices, the council, and the firms on the technology park: case files, drawings and two-bay boxes bought as a safety net.
CV8, on the A46 between Coventry and Warwick. Consultancies and home offices in quantity, which means laptops, external drives and the occasional small server in a spare room.
B90 to B93, the offices around Blythe Valley and Land Rover at Lode Lane behind a good share of the work. Apple hardware turns up here more than anywhere else in the county, and a Mac disk or blade is £300 + VAT provided the storage unbolts.
CV37 and the villages around it. Theatre, hotels, agencies and a tourist season that runs on photography, so camera cards at £250 + VAT arrive here more than from anywhere else.
CV9, on Watling Street in the far north of the county. The old hatting town, now hauliers, trade counters and warehousing, with CCTV disks a regular part of the postbag.
CV47, a small market town on the A423 south-east of Leamington. Farming, quarrying and rural businesses, where the whole operation often lives on one office machine and a USB stick.
A recovery laboratory is a room, and the room is the expensive part. Filtered clean-air enclosures, imagers built to read past sectors that have gone weak, firmware tooling for faults an ordinary computer cannot even see, and shelves of donor mechanisms held on the chance that one of them matches the drive that arrives on Thursday. All of that has to be paid for whether or not anybody is using it that week, and a county of half a million people cannot keep such a room busy. Warwickshire has no shortage of capable IT firms. What it has never had is that room.
So the storage travels and the engineer stays put. The address is Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP — about fifty-five miles away, straight down the M40, an hour in a car. Reduced to what it means for you, that distance costs a single night. Hand a tracked parcel over in the county on a weekday afternoon and it is generally logged in the next morning, with the free assessment closing 2 working days later. Two things follow, and this site says both of them on every page. There is no Coventry office, no counter to walk into and no collection round. And the Oxford reception will take a device over the counter, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, for anyone who would rather not trust one to Royal Mail. The great majority post, and the rest of this page assumes you will.
Three kinds of business come back, and it is worth being able to tell them apart before a drive leaves your hands.
The first is the computer shop on a high street, and there is nothing wrong with one. It will take your drive in, put it in a jiffy bag, send it to a laboratory and add a margin to whatever comes back. Nobody is being misled. All it changes is the calendar: the parcel reaches a bench like this one anyway, about a week later, after an extra pair of hands has been involved.
The second is a national brand with a local-looking address, which on inspection is a serviced office or a mailbox. The drive goes to a central laboratory somewhere else in the country, exactly as it does here, and the only real difference is whether the site tells you so.
The third is a laboratory, and this site is the front of one. Every job goes to Oxford Data Recovery, which does recovery and nothing else, and the homepage says so rather than leaving you to work it out from a postcode. Distance stops earning its keep the moment a disk has genuinely failed. What a clicking drive needs is filtered air to be opened in, a donor matched on model and firmware, and an imager that treats a weak sector as something to come back to. None of that arrives any sooner for being fifteen minutes away on the A46.
Most weeks the ordinary job is one disk on its own — a 3.5-inch out of a tower in a Warwick office, a 2.5-inch from a student laptop, the disk inside an external case that one evening stopped being recognised. Every one of them takes the same route and meets the same bands. Cards and pen drives sit at £250 + VAT. A single drive is £300 + VAT whether it spins or not, with NVMe blades on the same rung. Recorder disks and encrypted volumes are £400 + VAT, which is also where a forensic image with deleted-file extraction and no report lands. Anything with several disks in it opens at £500 + VAT and climbs with the member count, and a forensic investigation written up as a report is £800 + VAT. VAT is added to each. What lies behind those figures is on data recovery cost, and the usual ways in are hard drive recovery, SSD recovery, SD and memory card recovery, NAS recovery and RAID 5 data recovery, with hard drive repair setting out what that phrase honestly covers and Mac OS X recovery taking the Apple side. A summary of the whole service is on data recovery services.
Coventry is the largest place in this area by a distance and it has a page to itself, along with HDD recovery in Coventry for the mechanical side. This page is everything else: the market towns to the south, the old mining belt to the north, Rugby away to the east, the motorway parks in between, and the western edge at Solihull. What the county has that the city does not is distance from anything — Southam, Atherstone and the villages behind Stratford are a long way from any counter, which is precisely why a tracked parcel and a written figure suit them better than a drive around the ring road ever did.
The boundary is not a limit either. Parcels join the same overnight run from Banbury, Daventry, Northampton, Redditch and Tamworth, and a postmark has never altered a figure or a position in the queue. One practical note applies wherever you are writing from: storage still bolted inside a laptop, a tower, a server or a recorder has to come out before it can be posted, and any repair shop will free it in a few minutes for very little.
The two get typed as one phrase often enough to be worth separating. There is no backup product on this site — no contract, no storage sold by the month, nothing to sign. What this is, is a bench that gets data back once something has already gone wrong, and the advice it gives about protecting yourself in future is free because it is not selling anything. Keep copies on separate media. Keep at least one of them away from the machine it is protecting. Open a file from the copy now and again to prove it is really there. By that standard a NAS in the cupboard beside the server is not a second copy, and neither is a mirrored pair, which the RAID 1 page goes into at length. When it is a whole office that has stopped rather than a single disk, that is IT disaster recovery in Coventry. Either way the first step is the free diagnostic.
Every media type this bench takes, and what it costs.
All five rungs in full, with the terms attached.
The mechanical side, and how it sounds.
When a whole office stops, not one disk.
No charge, one written figure, closed in two days.
Post it tracked and insured, get a free assessment inside 2 working days, and nothing begins without your yes.
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.