Warwick is a county town that never stopped being one. The castle and the visitor trade at one end, Shire Hall and the county's administration in the middle, a racecourse inside the town rather than out on its edge, and a long tail of solicitors, accountants, surveyors and consultancies in the Georgian streets around them. Add the technology park out on the Banbury road and the university that carries the town's name but sits over the boundary on the Coventry side, and the media that arrives here from CV34 tends to be somebody's professional obligation rather than their photograph collection.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Warwick. 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.
Solicitors, accountants and surveyors all keep records they are required to keep, and they keep them in three places: a practice management database on a small server, a shared folder that has been copied forward through three generations of hardware, and somebody's laptop. When the server stops or the laptop is dropped, the question is never merely whether the files come back but who is allowed to see them on the way. Everything here is worked under confidentiality as a matter of course and under a signed agreement where the practice or its insurer requires one. Nothing is opened beyond what the recovery needs, results return on fresh encrypted media, and you say in writing whether the original disk comes back or is destroyed.
A large share of Warwick's business laptops are encrypted, which changes both the method and the price. An encrypted disk is imaged first and unlocked afterwards, and that extra stage puts it at £400 + VAT rather than £300 + VAT. What makes it possible is the recovery key: the 48-digit BitLocker key, an administrator who can retrieve it from the directory or from a Microsoft account, or the equivalent for whatever else is in use. Without one, the image cannot be opened here or anywhere else, and you will hear that during the free examination rather than after an invoice. It is the one question worth answering before you pack the drive.
The visitor trade is Warwick's other economy and it fails in more ordinary ways. Hotels and guest houses around the castle, restaurants on Smith Street, the racecourse and its events, the tour operators and the shops that live off all three. Booking histories, card reconciliations, staff rotas and the accounts sit on one back-office machine, and the CCTV recorder in the office is the second thing they ring about. A recorder drive is £400 + VAT, it comes out of the box and travels on its own, and the unit should be unplugged the moment you know you need footage from it, because a running recorder writes over the oldest material first.
Where a dispute has already started — a departing employee, a contested set of accounts, an insurance claim — the work changes character rather than merely getting more expensive. Investigation carried through to a full written report is £800 + VAT. Where the requirement is only to preserve the evidence and pull back what was deleted, without a report at the end of it, that is £400 + VAT and is often the sensible first move while solicitors decide whether the matter is going anywhere. Either way the scope is agreed in writing beforehand, and this class of work sits outside no fix, no fee.
Households and the streets around Emscote and Woodloes send the everyday work as well, and it is priced on the same list: one drive or SSD £300 + VAT, a card or memory stick £250 + VAT, an old external drive with the family archive on it the same as a partner's laptop. Ransomware, when it reaches a small practice here, is billed as ordinary media too — £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for an array — never as investigation work.
All of this happens at Oxford Data Recovery, on the Oxford Science Park at Littlemore. From Warwick that is Junction 15 onto the M40 and about forty-five miles south, near enough fifty minutes, and reception takes devices across the counter Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Most practices post instead, tracked and insured, or send a courier they already use. There is no Warwick office to visit, no Coventry counter and no collection service. Take the disk out of the laptop or the tower and send the disk; an external drive stays sealed in its case and a NAS travels whole.
Five bands cover the whole of it and none of them moves once it has been written down. Multi-disk work — a RAID set, a NAS, a SAN or a server — opens at £500 + VAT and is priced by how many members it holds. Encryption, or a disk lifted out of a recorder, puts a job at £400 + VAT. One drive or SSD at any capacity is £300 + VAT. A card, a stick or a pen drive is £250 + VAT. Investigation work delivered with a report stands apart at £800 + VAT. Nothing at all is charged for the examination, which finishes two working days after the media reaches the bench, and an approved single-drive job is usually back with you inside another two to four. 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.