When storage fails at the worst possible moment, the useful question is not who answers a telephone at midnight but what you do in the next ten minutes. That part is given away here for nothing, symptom by symptom. Then comes the honest account of what speed is actually available: a job marked before the parcel lands, a free examination closing two working days after it is logged in, and not a penny added for being in a hurry.
Nothing is added for urgency: a drive is £300 + VAT and an array from £500 + VAT. Ring the freephone before you post and the job is marked, so it goes to the head of the queue the moment your parcel is logged in. The examination that produces the figure is free.
Most recoveries are settled inside the first hour, usually by somebody trying one more idea. Find the line that matches what your storage is doing and act on that before anything else happens today.
Off at the wall, and leave it off. Those sounds mean the mechanism inside cannot locate itself, and each further spin-up drags heads across surfaces they are already scoring. No software addresses it and no test is worth running. Every attempt to hear whether it sounds better this morning takes a measurable bite out of what returns.
Cancel, then unplug. Both of those write a new structure over the one that records where your files start, and both get offered at exactly the moment that structure is what has broken. The contents underneath are almost always whole when the box appears, and appreciably less whole once somebody has answered it.
Do not rebuild yet. A degraded set is still handing over everything, and reconstructing a stripe is the heaviest reading those remaining drives have done in years. Get a copy off first. Where that is impossible, power the unit down and have the members imaged before a replacement disk goes into any bay.
Stop using the machine and shut it down properly. Removing a file removes a pointer rather than the content, so what you want sits there until something lands on top of it — and a computer left running writes constantly on its own account. Above all, do not install recovery software onto the disk you are trying to save.
Do not dry it, do not bury it in rice, and above all do not switch it on. Wet electronics that get power short themselves out, and salt or soot baked onto a platter is far worse than the water ever was. Bag it, keep it damp rather than dried, and get it here quickly.
Disconnect the affected machines from the network now, before the encryption reaches whatever it has not yet found, and reinstall nothing. What realistically returns is the material it missed, originals it unlinked rather than overwrote, and older versions held elsewhere. Charged as media, and never quoted as investigation.
One is a telephone call before the parcel. Ring the freephone, describe what happened, and the job is marked in advance so that the instant it is booked in it goes to the head of the queue rather than the tail. That costs nothing and it makes a real difference: a drive posted on a tracked service this afternoon can be examined the day after it lands instead of waiting its turn, and whoever opens the box already knows the history and knows it matters to somebody.
The other is your own car. Oxford takes devices over the counter on weekdays from 9:00am to 5:30pm, and the run from Coventry is about fifty-five miles straight down the M40 — an hour, give or take the junctions. Leave at nine and the drive has changed hands before half past ten, which no courier network is going to match.
There is no line answered at midnight. Nobody is on call at three in the morning, no engineer drives to your premises, and no collection service exists anywhere in this network. The bench works Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5:30pm, and the free examination closes on the second working day after your media is logged in.
Plenty of firms advertise the opposite. Some of them mean an answering service and a courier account. Telling you exactly what happens is more use than letting a bad week be planned around a promise that turns into a call back on Monday. And when somebody quotes recovery hours before anyone has seen the disk, that is a guess made at your expense, which is rarely a guess in your favour.
The bands are printed and they do not shift because the call is urgent. One hard drive or SSD, £300 + VAT. Cards, sticks and pen drives, £250 + VAT. A recorder disk out of a CCTV system, or an encrypted volume with the key available, £400 + VAT. RAID sets, NAS boxes, SAN volumes and servers, from £500 + VAT and climbing with the member count. Forensic casework reported in full, £800 + VAT, or £400 + VAT for the verified image and its extracted deletions without a report. Ransomware is charged as media wherever it has landed.
Urgency reorders what gets looked at. It does not touch the figure, and anybody charging extra for panic is selling the panic rather than the recovery.
A dispiriting share of the work arriving here has been made harder by sixty minutes of willing help: a clicking disk powered up another five times, a repair utility aimed at a volume that was simply assembled in the wrong order, a rebuild begun on a set with a second tired drive in it, recovery software installed onto the very disk it was meant to rescue. None of it was stupid. All of it lengthened the job, and some of it closed doors that cannot be reopened.
If a single sentence survives this page, let it be this one. Storage stops being your problem to solve at the moment it starts behaving oddly. Power it down, write down what happened and in what order, and ring.
Day one: a tracked parcel handed over in Coventry leaves that evening. Day two: it arrives, it is logged in, and you are told so. The free examination then closes two working days after that logging-in — never earlier, because a proper look at a failing disk takes the time the disk is prepared to give — and it produces one fixed written figure beside an honest completion date, in the same message. Nothing whatever begins until you have accepted both.
From your authorisation, a straightforward single-drive job is generally finished inside two to four working days. A drive needing mechanical work in filtered air runs longer, because a matching donor has to be found before anything is opened. A set runs longer again, since every member is imaged before a filename appears. Those are working days, and they are the honest ones rather than the fastest anybody here has ever managed on an unusually good afternoon.
Rushing the parcel is the one shortcut that regularly costs people the recovery. The storage comes out and the machine stays where it is — laptop, tower, iMac or the recorder under the counter — because this bench does not dismantle equipment, though any repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Wrap it so nothing can move inside something rigid, and send it tracked and covered.
Three cases run the other way and getting them wrong is expensive. An external drive stays sealed in its own case. A network box travels complete with its disks in their bays. A Fusion Mac sends both of its drives, each one labelled, while the iMac stays on the desk. An array is the opposite again: members only, marked with the bay order, front panel photographed first. Storage soldered flat to a mainboard cannot be unbolted and cannot be posted, and neither phones nor tablets are handled here at all.
What the device is, how it stopped, what it sounds like, and — the important one — exactly what has already been tried on it. Nobody is marking you. A drive that has had three hours of scanning software across it needs a different approach from one switched off immediately, and knowing which is in the box saves a day at this end.
Have the capacity to hand if you can, plus some idea of what matters most on there. On a large job that genuinely reorders the work, so the accounts folder or the wedding photographs surface first instead of last. Where the trouble is a business one rather than a domestic one, disaster recovery for Coventry businesses takes the first hour apart in more detail.
Almost every job that lands here in a worse state than it needed to be spent an hour being helped first.
Multi-disk jobs travel as a set of bare drives sharing one padded box, and that parcel wants tracking and covering for what is written on it rather than what it weighs. Booked over a Coventry post office counter in the afternoon, it usually reaches the Oxford bench the next working morning — faster than most firms manage to spare somebody for the run down the M40.
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.