Leamington has two lives running side by side. One is the Regency town of stucco terraces, the Pump Rooms and the gardens along the Leam, full of surveyors, dentists, agencies and independent shops. The other is Silicon Spa, the densest cluster of games studios in the country outside London, working out of converted offices within ten minutes of the Parade. The second one sends this bench a class of work that hardly turns up anywhere else.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Leamington Spa. 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.
Game development produces enormous, awkward, irreplaceable files and stores a great deal of them locally. The engine project itself, source assets that were never checked in because they were still being tweaked, capture and reference footage, a build cache that took nine hours to generate, plus whatever an artist keeps in a working folder on the machine under the desk. When a workstation disk dies, the studio's version control is usually fine and the individual's last few days of unsubmitted work are not — and it is nearly always the unsubmitted work that hurts. That is an ordinary single-drive recovery: £300 + VAT for any hard drive, SSD or NVMe module, with the exact figure written down after a free examination.
Version-control workspaces are worth a paragraph of their own because they mislead people. A Perforce workspace or a local Git clone looks like a copy of the repository, and up to a point it is, but the parts that only exist on that disk are precisely the parts nobody else has: shelved changes, files marked for add, local branches never pushed, and whatever was open in an editor when the machine stopped. Recovery of those depends entirely on the file system rather than the server, so what matters is that nothing further has been written to the disk since. Shut the machine down and leave it down rather than reinstalling on top and hoping.
Asset libraries generally live on a NAS in a cupboard, and NAS units come here whole — disks still in their bays, unlike a drive out of a workstation. Most run a Linux file system underneath, which is good news more often than not: an ext4 or Btrfs volume that a synology-style box says is crashed has usually lost its structures rather than its contents, and the extents are still where they were put. Multi-disk work opens at £500 + VAT and goes up with the number of members. If a unit has dropped a disk, do not authorise a rebuild while you decide — leave it powered off.
Fast storage is where the money and the risk both sit. Studio machines run NVMe for the engine and often a striped pair for scratch, cache and video work, and neither warns you before it goes. A striped set has no redundancy at all and cannot survive a lost member on its own, so it needs every disk in the set, including the failed one, and the reconstruction is worked out from images rather than attempted on the hardware. Quoted from £500 + VAT. An NVMe module on its own stays in the £300 + VAT band.
The rest of the town behaves like a prosperous market town with a lot of professional practices in it. Architects with drawing archives, a dental practice whose imaging server holds records it is obliged to keep, agencies with client work going back years, shops along Regent Street and Warwick Street with a single back-office machine. Where the material is confidential, and in a town full of studios under embargo it very often is, the work runs under a written agreement, nothing is examined beyond what the recovery needs, and recovered files come back on fresh encrypted media rather than on the disk they came off.
Leamington is one of the closer towns on this list to the bench. Oxford Data Recovery sits on the Oxford Science Park at Littlemore, about forty-five miles away — the M40 from Junction 13 or 14 and off at Junction 9 — which is comfortably under an hour in normal traffic. That reception takes devices by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm if you would sooner deliver it than trust it to a carrier. Otherwise it is insured tracked post or a courier of your own; both are treated identically here. What does not exist is a Leamington unit, a Coventry counter or anybody who will drive out and collect.
Every band is published: £250 + VAT for a card, a stick or a pen drive; £300 + VAT for one hard drive, SSD or NVMe module; £400 + VAT where the disk is encrypted, or where it came out of a CCTV or DVR recorder; from £500 + VAT for a RAID set, a NAS or a server, according to the member count; £800 + VAT for a forensic investigation with a full written report, and £400 + VAT for a forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction where no report is needed. The free diagnostic closes two working days after booking-in and produces one written price. Single-drive recoveries typically finish two to four working days after approval. Logical faults are covered by 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.