Searched “data recovery near me”? The thing that matters isn’t a shop down the road — it’s a proper in-house operation with the correct kit and careful, secure handling. We cover the whole of Cambridgeshire, and reaching us is easy in two ways: come in and hand it over, or send it to us fully insured by post.
You’ll find us at Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, open weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm.
This page exists because it is what people search for, and the word is misleading in a way that costs money.
A failed hard drive cannot be repaired and returned to service. Not by us, not by anyone. A drive fitted with donor heads or a transplanted board is a vehicle for reading your data off once — it is a recovery tool, not a disk to trust with anything afterwards.
So when somebody offers to repair your hard drive, one of two things is happening. Either they mean recovery and are using the word loosely, which is common and harmless. Or they intend to return you a working-looking drive to keep using, which is not a service worth buying at any price.
What you actually want is the data. The drive is a write-off from the moment it failed, and every honest conversation about it starts there.
A general computer repair shop is set up to get machines working. Faced with a failing drive that is what they will do — run a file system repair, reinstall the operating system, clone what still reads onto a new disk. Each of those is reasonable if the goal is a working computer.
Each of them also writes to a disk that is already failing, and on a drive shedding surface that write frequently cannot complete. A meaningful share of the partial recoveries we handle arrived that way: recoverable when they failed, considerably less so after somebody tried to fix them.
If the machine matters more than the data, a repair shop is the right call. If the data matters more, the order has to be recovery first and repair afterwards.
The one instruction that matters most. If the drive is making any noise it has never made before, switch it off and leave it off. Not after finishing what you were doing. How long it ran after the first noise affects the outcome more than anything done afterwards.
Cards and USB media from £250 +VAT. A single hard drive, SSD or external from £300 +VAT. RAID, NAS and server arrays from £500 +VAT. Every figure fixed in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic and unchanged afterwards.
Most jobs run no fix, no fee. Where clean-air work or donor parts are involved those costs commit at the start, so a 50% deposit applies with the balance payable only on success. You are told which applies before agreeing to anything.
The electronics can. The mechanics can be made to work long enough to read the data off. Neither produces a drive you should keep using, and any offer to do so should be treated with suspicion.
They are the same work priced the same way. What differs is what you get back — your data on new media, rather than a drive with a limited future.
They may well get the machine working. Ask specifically what happens to the data if they cannot, and whether they will attempt anything that writes to the drive before you have a copy.
It can be recovered. Switch it off now — each further power-on risks scoring the platter, and that damage is the one genuinely irreversible outcome in this work.
Two to ten working days from your approval, depending on class. Logical faults at the short end, mechanical work needing a donor at the long end.
On most jobs there is nothing to pay. Where clean-air work was committed, the deposit covers those costs and the balance is not payable. You get told the realistic odds at the diagnostic rather than afterwards.