Solihull is a West Midlands borough rather than a Warwickshire town, which matters mainly to people drawing boundaries — the work travels the same road either way. It is prosperous, heavily corporate and unusually well connected: Land Rover at Lode Lane, business parks strung along the M42, the exhibition centre and the airport sitting on its eastern edge, and a great many people running substantial jobs from home offices in Knowle, Dorridge and Shirley.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Solihull. 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 most frequent Solihull parcel is a business laptop whose owner is fairly senior, whose disk is encrypted by policy, and whose machine has stopped in a way the service desk cannot fix from three hundred miles away. Encryption changes the method: the disk is imaged first and unlocked afterwards, which is why an encrypted drive is £400 + VAT rather than the £300 + VAT a plain one costs. Everything then depends on the recovery key existing somewhere — Intune, Active Directory, a key escrow tool, or the Microsoft account the laptop was enrolled under. Someone in IT can nearly always produce it in ten minutes. Nobody can produce data from an image whose key has genuinely been lost, and you will be told that during the free examination rather than later.
Ransomware arrives here from Solihull more often than from anywhere else on this list, usually at a firm of thirty to eighty people, usually over a weekend. It is priced as ordinary media and never as investigation work: £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for an array according to its member count. It is also logical damage rather than physical, which puts it under no fix, no fee. What helps is isolating the machines and leaving them alone; what does not is restoring a backup over the top before anybody has established what the backup actually contains, or letting a decryption tool of unknown provenance loose on the only copy.
Business parks along the M42 are full of firms with a single virtualisation host or a shared NAS holding everything anybody works on. When one of those stops, three things decide how the week goes. Do not authorise a rebuild onto a replacement disk. Do not let anybody re-create or re-initialise the array to see whether it comes back. Photograph the chassis front and label each disk with its bay before it is pulled. Then send the member disks alone, without the enclosure or the controller, or send a NAS as a complete unit with its disks in place. Each member is imaged individually and the set is assembled from those copies. Arrays and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the member count.
The exhibition and events trade on the eastern side of the borough has its own storage habits. Stand builders, AV contractors, agencies and photographers all work in a cycle of enormous files created in a hurry on site, dumped onto whatever disk was in the bag, and tidied up afterwards if there is time. Cards and portable drives take a hammering in that life, and the recurring job is a card that has been pulled out mid-write or a bus-powered drive that has been unplugged once too often. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT; a portable drive is £300 + VAT and travels sealed in its own case rather than being taken apart.
Where the problem is a person rather than a machine — a suspected leak, a disputed record, somebody who left with more than they should have — there are two separate services and they are priced apart. The full investigation, written up in a report a non-engineer can follow, is £800 + VAT. The narrower job of taking a forensic binary image and extracting the deleted material, with no report attached, is £400 + VAT and suits an internal matter that may never leave the building. Scope is settled in writing first, and neither is covered by no fix, no fee.
There is no Solihull office, no Coventry counter and no collection service, in this borough or any other. The bench is Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park at Littlemore, roughly sixty miles away by the M42 and the M40 south, about an hour and ten minutes. Reception accepts hand-delivered devices Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Otherwise it is insured tracked post or a courier account of your own, and a parcel handed over in the afternoon is normally booked in the following morning. Send the drive rather than the machine: a laptop, a tower and an iMac all give theirs up in a few minutes, but flash soldered to a mainboard cannot be removed at all.
Prices are the same whether the invoice goes to a household or to a plc. £250 + VAT for a memory card, a USB stick or a pen drive. £300 + VAT for any one hard drive or SSD, capacity irrelevant. £400 + VAT for an encrypted disk or one taken out of a CCTV or DVR recorder. From £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS and SAN arrays and servers, depending on member count. £800 + VAT for forensic investigation with a full written report. The examination is free and closes two working days after booking-in, single-drive work usually completes two to four working days after approval, and urgent jobs go to the front of the queue without a premium. 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.