Almost everything that arrives on this bench has a date on it: a submission, grant reports, an audit, a board pack. So the first thing we offer you is not a sales call. It is a written response, within 48 hours and at no cost to you, saying whether the data will be returned, how long it will take to do that and what it will cost. One figure fixed before anything is opened. Hard disks, SSDs, RAID sets, NAS units and memory cards are worked on at Vision Park by the engineers who answer the telephone.
The part most laboratories leave vague is the part which decides if you will meet your deadline. Your diagnostic report usually arrives in writing within 48 hours of receiving the device, and once you have approved the quote, most of our data recovery tasks are completed within an additional 1-2 working days. Nothing is charged until you see the written diagnostic. Prices start from £250 plus VAT for cards and USB media and £300 for a single drive. Exactly how much it will cost is fixed at stage four and does not change afterwards.
The one job we will not quote for. Storage which is soldered onto the motherboard. We only perform recovery on drives that can be removed from their host computer. Therefore, storage which is soldered onto the motherboard does not have a price tag associated with it. Additionally, in newer Macs using T2 or Apple Silicon chips, the encryption keys are embedded in the security chip on that board and cannot be read or used on other devices in any case. Given how many Macs this city runs, we advise you loudly before sending anything (not on an invoice) that there is no pricing for storage which is soldered onto the motherboard. More on Mac storage →
Written up from real jobs with all identifiable information removed. We included the third intentionally: a lab that only posts its “100%ers” tells you something about the rest of its week.
Routine maintenance was done on this unit. Disks were pulled, and re-seated in bays, but there was no record of where they originally came from. None of the members (drives) had actually failed: the controller simply couldn't build an array with a sequence it had lost. There are approximately 620 billion trillion ways to order 24 drives, so going through them as a way of solving the problem was never even a plan, and attempting each configuration on actual hardware risks having the controller overwrite the necessary metadata to solve it. Instead, the layout was derived from data contained on read-only images, and then the array was built outside of the enclosure that lost it.
A portable that would not be detected, taken apart on what is generally considered a legitimate assumption that a bare drive should read on any system. Most other manufacturers' drives do. My Passport units have encryption enabled by default regardless of whether a user has established a password. The key material is stored on the small USB bridge circuitry board inside the casing rather than on the platters themselves. Therefore, the case itself is technically the drive. The case/enclosure had already been discarded before recovery could occur. It took a matching bridge and patient reading past the damaged sections to recover the contents.
The card was completely functional electronically (no failure with the controller, no failed or damaged blocks, and therefore no repair was needed), making this the more difficult conversation instead of an easy conversation. Deleting a file merely designates the area where the file resided as available for use again, and doing a fast format only re-writes the directory (or “index”) of the card; therefore after both operations all previous information can usually be restored. Writing data to overwrite data places the new information directly into the same areas of the card that previously contained other information, and since writing over data does not retrieve the information that existed under the newly written information, there is no way to get back to that information. Cloning the card with a write blocker, followed by carving out specific signatures from the cloned card, provided the following results: all of the original data that did not fall within the area of the new video footage returned at its original resolution, and the rest of the original data was identified rather than simply dismissed.
We do not win any work from these items. They are here because all four come up in phone calls most weeks, and knowing the answer early is what makes the difference between a recoverable drive and a drive that has been powered on eleven more times while someone thought about it.
A functional drive is one you are able to copy. Copy it now with the most critical files first, onto anything else you own, then stop using it. The lab does not add value to a readable disk; each hour a failing drive is used, it fails further. Call us today and we'll tell you all of this, for free; no sales pitches.
Let us know your deadline when first contact is made. If you're looking to get your data recovered by Friday and there's going to be a head swap required during the recovery process, we would let you know on that first day instead of waiting until the fourth day. Sometimes it makes sense to pull out the information you want and then come back later and finish the full recovery. A partial first recovery costs the same but allows you to get access to what you need quicker.
A TRIM command can instruct the controller to erase those blocks within minutes of deleting them, and once erased, this cannot be reversed through software. On the other hand, a mechanical drive could hold onto deleted blocks (and thus potentially restorable data) for months. Whether this is worth starting at all largely comes down to what type of drive you are using, and we will make sure to advise you which it is prior to you committing to anything.
No company has broken the current strains, and those companies which claim they have are either guessing or quietly paying on your behalf. What recovers data is what an encryption run did not remove, such as unerased shadow copies, original files still remaining in free space, and machines and volumes that the encryption never reached prior to someone pulling the plug.
Twenty-four years of sitting on one bench in one area paints a pretty good picture of what breaks down here and why. The picture painted by twenty-four years of sitting on one bench in one area isn't going to be the same in a manufacturing town. This picture also changes how we triage everything that comes in.
The three pieces of data (doctoral data on an external drive, the sequencing results on the lab disk belonging to no-one and a thesis on the laptop) are usually technically normal. What is abnormal is that there isn't a duplicate of the data elsewhere and they have a submission date in their calendar.
The microscopes, spectrometers, sequencers, and test rigs have been installed with control software which cannot install itself on anything current. In addition to this, the original drive is either IDE or early SATA, and the machine has run continuously for ten years. Replacing it is completely out of the question at this point, since each instrument only communicates with the software that originally came with it.
A four-bay NAS system that quietly evolved into the company file server over time, a RAID 5 system that nobody has reviewed since it was implemented, and a virtual machine host where the entire development environment exists. Over time growth surpassed the company's plans for its storage needs, and nothing caused them to check/evaluate the storage needs until they realised that a disk had failed.
The region to the north of the city is where the work transitions into an industrial and agricultural type of activity: packhouse control systems, weighbridge PCs, grain storage and irrigation systems, and yard CCTV. This is an area from which this type of equipment arrives with dirt and moisture, and is often corroded. This is due to the fact that many of these types of pieces of equipment operate for fifteen years without being replaced; there was no reason to replace them.
Submissions, funding rounds, audits, grant reports, and court disclosure. More than anywhere else we cover, we're concerned not only with whether the data will be returned but with whether it returns in time, and because of this we've implemented a deadline for the written verdict: 48 hours, as opposed to whenever.
Two examples of devices (a camera card from a fen packhouse line and a twenty-four-bay array from a Milton Keynes distribution centre) receive equal treatment: both are imaged before they are even opened; both are rebuilt from their image; and both are compared against the image before being released.
Our recovery centre, Compass House at Vision Park, is located on the north side of Cambridge, two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 and on the guided busway from the city centre. There is parking available adjacent to the building where the actual recovery takes place. All of our data recovery services are performed by our engineers in-house. Data is never taken to a third-party lab, or even out of the United Kingdom.
The main reason we chose this location at Junction 32, rather than in the centre, is that Ely, St Ives, Huntingdon, Newmarket, Royston and Saffron Walden are each within a 30-minute drive and none require travelling through city traffic. St Neots, Bury St Edmunds, Stevenage and Bedford can each be reached in under 60 minutes. Our service also extends into surrounding counties including Suffolk (via Newmarket and Ipswich); Norfolk (via Thetford and Norwich); Essex (down the M11 through Bishop's Stortford, Chelmsford and Colchester); and Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire (via Stevenage, Luton and Milton Keynes).
Beyond that, insured post really is the sensible choice, as opposed to a last resort. Most of the work we receive from Norwich, Ipswich and the towns in Kent arrives by courier, and we pay for the return journey. The diagnostic clock starts on the morning we open your package, not the day you made the call. How postal recovery works →
If you've been searching data recovery near me in Cambridgeshire, then this is the local solution: a true address on Vision Park where you can simply come to us, and our engineers will physically handle the recovery within the office rather than outsource it to a third-party lab.
This is also applicable to the narrower search terms. Hard drive recovery near me, SSD recovery, RAID recovery and memory card recovery all end up in the same building and on the same bench. Data recovery near me →
Prices begin at £250 +VAT for logical and flash-based work, while prices for physical faults begin at £300 +VAT. Pricing for RAID systems begins at £500 +VAT. There are also two flat-rate pricing structures available for Fusion Drives and encrypted media. The full cost breakdown explains how jobs are moved between these pricing levels.
No-one should ever quote you a price band that widens once they open up the case. If a lab will not provide you with a fixed price in writing prior to opening the case, ask them why. FAQ and pricing →
A free written assessment within 48 hours, with a single set price prior to anything being opened, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. We have been doing this for twenty years, from an address you can walk to.