Almost everything that reaches this bench has a date attached to it — a submission, a grant report, an audit, a board pack. So the first thing we give you is not a sales call. It is a written answer, inside 48 hours and at no charge, saying whether the data is coming back, how long it will take and what it will cost. One figure, fixed before anything is opened. Hard disks, SSDs, RAID sets, NAS units and memory cards, worked on at Vision Park by the engineers who answer the phone.
$ cdr diagnose /dev/sda → Device: Seagate ST2000DM008 (2 TB) → Status: CLICKING — head stack failure → Client: confidential · Huntingdon $ cdr engineer-working → Donor PCB matched: 100A4544 rev D → Head-stack swap: complete → Imaging: 1.78 TB / 1.81 TB $ cdr verify → ✓ thesis_final — 11 chapters, 340 figures → ✓ sequencing_run_07 — 4,201 files → ✓ everything else — back home
The part most laboratories leave vague is the bit that decides whether you make your deadline. Here is the whole sequence instead, from the moment a device is logged in to the moment you get a written answer. Nothing is charged until you have that answer in front of you, and prices start at £250 plus VAT for cards and USB media, £300 for a single drive — the exact figure is fixed at stage four and does not move afterwards.
The one job we will not quote for. Apple storage soldered to a logic board that will not power on — T2 and Apple Silicon machines — has no price here, because it has no method. The encryption key is fused into the security chip on that board and cannot be lifted to another. Given how many Macs this city runs, we say it loudly: you will hear that at the free diagnostic, not on an invoice. More on Mac storage →
Written up from real work with the identifying details stripped out. The third one is here deliberately — a laboratory that only ever publishes its hundred-per-cents is telling you something about the rest of its week.
Routine maintenance, disks pulled and reseated, no note kept of which bay each came from. Not one member had actually failed — the controller simply could not assemble an array whose sequence had been lost. Twenty-four drives can be ordered roughly 620 billion trillion ways, so working through arrangements was never a plan, and each attempt on live hardware risks the controller writing fresh metadata over the evidence needed to solve it. The layout was derived from the data on read-only images instead, and the array assembled outside the box that lost it.
A portable that stopped being detected, opened up on the entirely reasonable assumption that a bare drive reads on any machine. On most brands it does. My Passport units encrypt by default whether or not a password was ever set, and the key material lives on the small USB bridge board inside the shell rather than on the platters — so the shell is the drive, and the plastic had already been thrown out. Recovery came through a matched bridge and a patient read past the damaged regions.
The card was electrically perfect — no controller fault, no bad blocks, nothing to repair — which made it the harder conversation rather than the easier one. Deleting a file only marks the space as free, and a quick format only rewrites the index, so both usually come back in full. Overwriting physically puts new data into the same cells, and nothing retrieves what was underneath. Cloned through a write blocker, then carved by signature: everything the new footage had not landed on came back at full resolution, and the rest was named rather than glossed over.
None of these win us work. They are here because all four come up by phone most weeks, and knowing the answer early is the difference between a recoverable drive and one that has been powered on eleven more times while somebody thought about it.
A drive that still opens is a drive you can copy. Do it now, most important files first, onto anything else you own — then stop using it. A clean-air bench adds nothing to a disk you can already read, and a dying drive gets worse every hour it stays in service. Ring and we will say exactly that, free, without trying to sell past it.
Tell us the date at the first call. If a thesis is due Friday and the drive needs a head swap, we will say so on day one rather than day six — and sometimes the right advice is to extract the four chapters you need first and do the full recovery afterwards. Partial-first costs the same. It just gets the important part back sooner.
TRIM can have the controller wipe those blocks within minutes of the deletion, and an erased block is gone in a way no software reverses. The identical deletion on a mechanical drive may sit untouched for months. Which of the two you are holding largely decides whether this is worth starting at all, and we will tell you which before you commit to anything.
Nobody breaks the current strains, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing or quietly paying on your behalf. What does recover data is everything the encryption run missed — shadow copies it failed to clear, originals still sitting in free space, and the machines and volumes it never reached before somebody pulled the plug.
Twenty-four years on one bench in one region produces a fairly clear picture of what fails here and why. It is not the same picture we would draw in a manufacturing town, and it changes how we triage what arrives.
Doctoral data on one external drive, sequencing output on a lab disk nobody owns, a thesis on the laptop and nowhere else. The technical job is usually ordinary; what is not ordinary is that there is no second copy anywhere and a submission date in the calendar.
Microscopes, spectrometers, sequencers and test rigs running control software that will not install on anything current. The drive is IDE or early SATA, the machine has run continuously for a decade, and replacing it is not an option because the instrument only speaks to that software.
A four-bay NAS that quietly became the company file server, a RAID 5 nobody has checked since it was commissioned, a VM host holding the whole development environment. Growth outran the storage plan and nothing prompted a review until a disk dropped out.
North of the city the work turns agricultural and industrial — packhouse controllers, weighbridge PCs, grain store and irrigation systems, yard CCTV. These arrive dirty, damp and often corroded, from equipment that has run for fifteen years because nothing ever prompted a replacement.
Submissions, grant reports, audits, funding rounds, court disclosure. More than anywhere else we cover, the question is not only whether the data comes back but whether it comes back in time — which is why the written verdict lands at 48 hours rather than whenever.
A camera card off a fen packhouse line and a twenty-four-bay array out of a Milton Keynes distribution centre get the identical treatment: imaged before anything is touched, rebuilt from the copy, verified against the image before release.
We work out of Compass House at Vision Park, on the northern edge of the city — two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32, on the guided busway from the centre, and parking outside the door. Everything is done at that address; nothing is forwarded to a partner laboratory somewhere else.
Sitting at Junction 32 rather than in the centre is the whole point: Ely, St Ives, Huntingdon, Newmarket, Royston and Saffron Walden are all inside half an hour without going near the city traffic, and St Neots, Bury St Edmunds, Stevenage and Bedford inside the hour. Past the county line we take work from Suffolk through Newmarket and Ipswich, Norfolk through Thetford and Norwich, Essex down the M11 through Bishop's Stortford, Chelmsford and Colchester, and Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire through Stevenage, Luton and Milton Keynes.
Beyond that, insured post is genuinely the sensible option rather than a fallback — Norwich, Ipswich and the Kent towns mostly reach us by courier, and we pay the return leg. The diagnostic clock starts the morning a package is opened, not the day you rang. How postal recovery works →
If you have searched data recovery near me from somewhere in Cambridgeshire, this is the local answer — a real address on Vision Park with the work done at that address, rather than a collection point that quietly forwards your drive to a laboratory in another county.
The same applies to the narrower searches. Hard drive recovery near me, SSD recovery, RAID recovery and memory card recovery all land in the same building and on the same bench. Data recovery near me →
Prices here start at £250 excluding VAT for logical and flash work and £300 for physical faults, with arrays from £500 and two flat rates for Fusion Drives and encrypted media. The full cost breakdown explains what moves a job between those bands.
Nobody should be quoting you a range that widens after they open the case. If a laboratory will not give you a fixed figure in writing before starting, ask why. FAQ and pricing →
A free written diagnostic inside 48 hours, one fixed figure before anything is opened, and on most jobs nothing to pay if it does not work. Two decades of it, from an address you can walk to.