Nuneaton is the biggest town in Warwickshire and has never been a quiet one. Coal came out of Griff and Bermuda for a century and a half, the quarries worked the ridge towards Ansley, and the sheds and estates that replaced all of it now line the A444 down to the M6. Storage arrives here from CV10 and CV11 in about that proportion: a recorder out of a shop, a desktop from a haulage office, and a family's external drive carrying twenty years of photographs.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Nuneaton. 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.
Shops around the Ropewalk and Abbey Street run leaner than their turnover suggests. The till system, the stock file, the supplier accounts and last year's VAT working all sit on one machine in a back room that gets warm in summer, and the backup is either a USB stick somebody remembers to plug in or nothing at all. When that machine stops, the shop keeps trading and the paperwork stops dead. A single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT whatever its capacity, a USB stick or memory card is £250 + VAT, and the examination that fixes the figure costs nothing at all.
Behind the retail the town is still making and moving things. Light manufacturing on the estates at Bermuda and Attleborough, engineering firms supplying the motor trade down the road, hauliers using the A444 as their front door and the rail yards on the West Coast line. That work throws up a particular kind of parcel: a design PC with a fortnight of drawings on a second disk, a transport office server holding the job history, a workshop laptop whose owner has never once thought about where the files live. None of it is unusual and none of it is beyond asking about.
Nuneaton sends more CCTV work than anywhere else on this list, and it nearly always arrives late. An incident happens, the insurer or the police ask for footage a fortnight later, and by then the recorder has been quietly writing over the period in question ever since. Pull the power out of the unit the moment you know you need something off it. Then take the drive out — two screws and a lead on most boxes — and send that alone rather than the recorder. Recorder work is £400 + VAT because those drives use their own layouts rather than anything Windows would recognise, and DVR jobs are one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, so the free examination tells you what is still on the disk before you decide anything.
The domestic side of the town is simpler and sadder. One external drive on a shelf, bought when the laptop filled up, holding every photograph anybody took between about 2005 and last week. It gets dropped, or it stops spinning up, or Windows starts asking to format it. If a volume asks to be formatted, say no — accepting writes a new empty structure over the map of what is on the disk. An external drive is also the one item that travels sealed in its own case exactly as it is, rather than being taken apart first.
There is nothing to call in at. No counter in Nuneaton, nothing at Bermuda Park, nothing in Coventry either, and nobody drives out to fetch devices from anywhere. Recovery needs clean-air working, imaging hardware and a shelf of donor drives, and that lives in one place: Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park at Littlemore. From Nuneaton it is about sixty-five miles — the A444 down to the M6, round Coventry and then the M40 south — call it an hour and a half if you would rather drive it in, and that reception takes devices by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Most people use Royal Mail Special Delivery, which is tracked and insured all the way, or their own courier account. Either way you hear from us as soon as the parcel is logged.
The whole price list is short enough to print here. A memory card, a USB stick or a pen drive is £250 + VAT. Any one hard drive or SSD, including an NVMe module, is £300 + VAT. A CCTV or DVR recorder drive is £400 + VAT, and so is a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted disk. RAID, NAS and SAN arrays and servers open at £500 + VAT and go up according to how many members they hold. A forensic investigation delivered with a full written report is £800 + VAT. The free examination closes two working days after your media is booked in and produces one written figure that does not move afterwards; a straightforward single-drive job is normally finished two to four working days after you approve it. Logical recoveries carry 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.