Southam is a small market town on the A423 with Coventry at one end of the road and Banbury at the other, arable country around it and the canal locks a couple of miles away at Stockton. The cement works that once defined the place has gone; what is left is farming, a light-industrial estate, a lot of trades working out of yards, and businesses small enough that one computer holds everything. That last detail is why most CV47 parcels arrive here.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Southam. 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.
A firm of four people does not have a server, a backup regime or anybody whose job includes worrying about either. It has a desktop in the office with the accounts package on it, a folder of quotes and drawings, the photographs taken on site, and perhaps a memory stick that goes home in a pocket on Fridays. When the desktop stops, all of that stops. The good news is that the fault is frequently logical rather than physical — a corrupt file system, a partition that has disappeared, a failed update that left the machine unable to boot — and logical work runs under no fix, no fee. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, and a card or stick £250 + VAT.
The farms out towards Napton, Ladbroke and Long Itchington run the same shape of setup with more paperwork attached to it. Field and cropping records, spray and fertiliser logs, contractor invoices, the grant and subsidy claims that have to be evidenced years later. Most of it lives on one machine in a farm office, and a good share of it is legally required to be produced on request. A drive that has run continuously for eight or ten years in a building that is cold half the year is not failing because of neglect; it is failing because that is what drives eventually do.
Most of this page is about what is possible, so here is the other side of it, because being told at the start is cheaper than finding out later. Data that has been written over is gone — there is no equipment anywhere that reads underneath an overwrite, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. Storage soldered flat to a mainboard, which is how a good many slim laptops and the newer Macs are built, cannot be removed and cannot be read. Files deleted from a healthy SSD are usually cleared by the drive itself within minutes and rarely come back. Mobile phones and tablets are not accepted at all, in any condition. Everything else — computers, external drives, NAS units, servers, memory cards, USB sticks and recorder disks — is worth asking about, and asking costs nothing.
The things people do in the first hour decide more jobs than the original fault does. If a disk has started making a noise it did not make before, take the power off it. If Windows offers to format a drive you know has files on it, refuse. Do not install recovery software onto the disk you are trying to rescue, because the installation itself writes to the very space the files are sitting in. Do not let a machine run repair passes overnight in the hope it sorts itself out. A drive left alone after the fault is a far better job than one that has been fought with for a fortnight.
Small trades in the town keep a recorder in the yard for the plant and the vans, and those come off the same list: the drive out of the recorder, not the recorder, at £400 + VAT, with the unit unplugged as soon as you know footage matters. Where a business has grown into a NAS in a cupboard, that travels whole with its disks still in it, and multi-disk work opens at £500 + VAT according to how many members the volume has.
The A423 that runs through Southam goes to Banbury, and Banbury is twenty-odd miles from Oxford, which makes this the shortest run on the whole list — under forty miles to Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP, and about fifty minutes in the car. Reception takes devices by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm, so dropping one in is a genuine option here in a way it is not from the north of the county. If you would rather not drive, insured tracked post arrives the next working day. What does not exist is a Southam drop-off, a Coventry counter or a collection service.
The whole price list: £250 + VAT for a memory card, USB stick or pen drive; £300 + VAT for one hard drive or SSD of any capacity; £400 + VAT for a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted disk, and the same for a drive out of a CCTV or DVR recorder; from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS and SAN arrays or servers, rising with the member count. Investigation work is £800 + VAT where a full written report is wanted, and £400 + VAT for a binary image with the deleted material extracted and nothing written up. The examination costs nothing and is done within two working days of the parcel being logged. Most single-drive recoveries complete within two to four working days of approval. 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.