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Questions · prices

Questions, prices and the honest limits.

The answers people actually ring about, the full price list, and the five things nobody can do — set out here so you are not paying someone to discover them.

Free 48-hour diagnostic
Fixed written quote
No fix, no fee · most jobs
// starting prices

From £250 + VAT.

The figure is put in writing once the free diagnostic is done — and not one moment before. Every price on this page excludes VAT.

£250
Cards & USB
£300
Single drives
£500
RAID & NAS, from
£1,250
SAN, from
48 hr
Free diagnostic
No fix
No fee, most jobs
// prices

Published, and fixed in writing.

MediaClassFrom
Memory cards and USB sticksLogical, flash, monolithic Deleted, formatted, corrupt, snapped connectors and chip-level reads where the controller has failed. £250 +VAT
Single hard drive, SSD or externalAny fault class The same figure whether it turns out to be a dead board, a failed head stack, damaged firmware or a corrupt file system. £300 +VAT
RAID, NAS and server arraysAny level, any member count Every member imaged individually, geometry derived, volume reconstructed. Includes database and mail store extraction. £500 +VAT
Enterprise storage and SANQuoted individually Member count, capacity and platform vary too much for a list price. Quoted as a fixed figure after the free diagnostic. From £500
// how the pricing works

Four things that do not change.

01 / FREE DIAGNOSTIC

48 hours, written

No charge for looking, and no obligation afterwards. You get the fault class, what we expect to recover and one figure.

02 / FIXED, NOT ESTIMATED

Agreed before work starts

The number does not move once the drive is open. No percentage of the data, no hourly rate, no surcharge for a difficult afternoon.

03 / NO FIX, NO FEE

On most jobs

Recovery fails, you pay nothing. Where clean-air work or donor parts commit costs at the start, a 50% deposit applies and you are told beforehand.

04 / AN HONEST NO

Free, and early

Roughly one job in nine cannot be recovered. You hear that at 48 hours rather than in week three, and there is nothing to pay.

// the honest limits

Four things nobody recovers.

Soldered Apple storage on a dead board. T2 and Apple Silicon machines fuse the encryption key into a security chip on the logic board. If that board will not power on, there is no method and no price.

Encryption without the key. BitLocker, FileVault and correctly implemented full-disk encryption have no back door. With the key it makes no difference; without it there is no route in.

TRIMmed SSD deletions. Once the controller has erased freed blocks, no laboratory or software reaches them. Whether it has run is what the diagnostic establishes.

Current ransomware strains. Nobody decrypts them. What recovers is everything the encryption run missed, which is frequently substantial.

// questions

Common ones, answered.

Yes, including the written verdict. If the answer is that it is not worth attempting, you get that instead of a quotation and there is nothing to pay.

No. The figure agreed after the diagnostic is the figure on the invoice. A quote that can rise was an estimate.

48 hours to a written verdict, then two to ten working days depending on class. Logical work at the short end, arrays and mechanical work at the long end.

Never. Percentage arrangements give a laboratory a direct interest in what your data is worth and in you believing recovery is possible.

On new encrypted media or by secure link, with a file list you see before paying. Original media held 14 days then securely wiped unless you ask otherwise.

Yes. Purchase orders raised before work begins, invoicing on account, NDA signed before media arrives, and one named engineer throughout.