Kenilworth is a town people live in and work somewhere else from — Coventry one way, Warwick and Leamington the other, the A46 taking most of them there. The red ruin on the hill and the Abbey Fields are the town's public face; the working one is a great many consultants, accountants, surveyors and one-person limited companies operating from a room at home. When a laptop stops in CV8 it is usually somebody's whole business that has stopped with it.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Kenilworth. The written figure comes first and the work comes after it: £300 + VAT one disk or SSD, £250 + VAT a card or a stick, from £500 + VAT an array.
The home office is a particular kind of risk and nobody sets out to build one. Everything ends up on the machine you sit at: the accounting file, the client folders, the quotes, the tax records you are obliged to keep for six years, and the photographs from a family holiday because it seemed as good a place as any. There is no IT department to have insisted on a backup, and the external drive bought two years ago is either full or has not been plugged in since the spring. That is not carelessness; it is what happens when the same person is doing the work and running the business.
A machine that stops at the manufacturer's logo, or reaches a blue screen and reboots, or spins for a minute and offers to repair itself, is usually a file-system problem rather than a dead disk — and the offer to repair itself is the dangerous part. Letting Windows run a repair, or running chkdsk at a volume that is already damaged, can turn recoverable directory structures into thousands of numbered fragments in a found folder. The safest sequence is to switch it off, take the drive out, and send the drive on its own; that is £300 + VAT for any hard drive or SSD, with the figure confirmed after an examination that costs nothing.
Small practices in the town keep more storage than they think. A two-bay NAS in the study for the shared folder, an old desktop under the desk still holding the archive from the previous business, a portable drive that goes back and forth to a client's office. Multi-disk units travel whole and start at £500 + VAT depending on the member count. Portable drives stay sealed in their cases. Memory sticks and cards, which is where an alarming number of people keep the only copy of a presentation, are £250 + VAT.
Encryption catches out the self-employed more often than the corporate world, because it gets switched on by a device-management policy from a client or by a laptop that arrived with it enabled and nobody wrote the key down. An encrypted drive is £400 + VAT and needs its recovery key to be worth attempting. Check for the key before the drive goes in the post — it is normally in the Microsoft account the machine was signed into.
There is no Kenilworth drop-off, no Coventry counter and no van that comes out to collect. Everything is worked at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park at Littlemore, which is about fifty miles from CV8 — the A46 down to Junction 15 and then the M40 — and reception takes devices by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Posting is what most people do: a padded box, nothing loose inside, tracked and insured, with a note giving your name, a number you will answer and a sentence about how the trouble began. You are told the moment it is booked in.
The bands, in full and in plain figures: a card, USB stick or pen drive £250 + VAT; a single hard drive or SSD £300 + VAT; an encrypted drive or a recorder disk £400 + VAT; a NAS, RAID or server from £500 + VAT with the member count; a forensic investigation with a full written report £800 + VAT. The diagnostic is free and closes two working days after your media is booked in; single drives are generally finished two to four working days after the quote is approved. Logical work carries no fix, no fee. Freephone 0800 689 0668.
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.
Looking is free, one disk or SSD is £300 + VAT, and a card or a stick is £250 + VAT.