Stratford earns its living from visitors, and that shapes what fails here. Hotels and guest houses with a back-office machine holding every booking they have ever taken, restaurants and shops around Bridge Street and Sheep Street, the theatres and everything that orbits them, and a striking number of photographers and video people working the weddings, the productions and the tourist marketing. Cards and camera media make up a bigger share of CV37 parcels than they do from anywhere else in the county.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Stratford-upon-Avon. 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 card formatted by accident in the camera is the most hopeful thing on this whole page. A format writes a fresh table of contents and leaves the pictures themselves sitting in the cells they were written to, so the frames are still there until something puts new data on top of them. That makes what you do next the only thing that matters. Take the card out of the camera immediately, put it somewhere safe, and do not shoot another frame on it, do not let the camera format it again and do not let a laptop write anything to it. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT, and the examination that says what is still readable is free.
Cards fail physically as well, and that is a different conversation. A card pulled out mid-write, a controller that has given up, a card snapped in a slot. Where the memory chip itself is intact there is usually a route through; where the break runs across the chip there is nothing left to read and saying otherwise would be dishonest. Do not tape or glue the pieces together, because that generally removes what chance remained. Chip-level work is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, so you get the realistic odds and the price before anybody attempts anything.
The video trade in Stratford runs on portable drives, and portable drives spend their lives in a camera bag in a car boot. The classic job is an edit in progress: the project file, the proxies and the graded footage all on one bus-powered disk, with the original cards already wiped and reused because the drive was the backup. When that disk stops being recognised, an edit that took three weeks stops with it. A portable drive is £300 + VAT like any other single disk, and it travels sealed in its own enclosure exactly as it is rather than being opened up first — that is the opposite of the rule for a drive inside a computer.
The hospitality side sends steadier, duller and equally urgent work. A hotel's property management database on an ageing server, a restaurant's till and stock system, a guest house whose entire accounts history is on one desktop under the reception desk. Add the recorder in the office, which is £400 + VAT and needs its drive taking out and sending on its own, and which should be unplugged the moment somebody realises footage will be needed, because it overwrites the oldest material first. Where there are several disks in a unit, work starts at £500 + VAT and rises with how many members it holds.
The theatres and the freelance world around them produce archives nobody else has: production stills, rehearsal recordings, design files, sound libraries built over years. Those tend to live on an external drive or a small NAS with no second copy, because the person who owns them is not an IT department. Anything recovered comes back on fresh encrypted media rather than on the disk it came off, and you decide in writing whether the original is returned alongside it or destroyed.
Stratford is the closest town on this list to the bench along the old road: the A3400 runs south through Shipston and drops into Oxford in about forty miles, or you can pick up the M40 at Junction 15 if you prefer dual carriageway. The address is Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP, and that reception takes devices by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. There is no Stratford drop-off, no Coventry counter and no collection round. A card goes in a padded envelope, tracked; a drive goes in a box packed so nothing shifts; and a note with your name and a working phone number goes in beside it.
The bands run from £250 + VAT for a card, a stick or a pen drive, through £300 + VAT for any single hard drive or SSD whatever its size, to £400 + VAT for an encrypted disk or a recorder drive, and from £500 + VAT for anything with multiple members in it. Forensic investigation with a full written report is £800 + VAT. You are quoted once, in writing, two working days after the media reaches the bench, and that figure is the one you pay. Cards and single drives are usually finished two to four working days after approval. Logical faults — deleted images, a formatted card, a corrupt file system — carry no fix, no fee. Freephone 0800 689 0668, weekdays.
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.