Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Distribution and light manufacturing along the A120 corridor, with a retail and outlet presence out of proportion to the town's size and estates spread toward Witham and Great Notley.
Roughly 50 minutes and 37 miles separate Braintree from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Witham, Halstead, Coggeshall and the wider Essex area.
Thirty-seven miles south via the M11 and A120, about fifty minutes.
Braintree has a distribution and light manufacturing base along the A120 corridor and a retail sector out of proportion to its size. The recovery work is mid-sized business material — stock and warehouse systems, EPOS and retail databases, and the servers of firms large enough to have a network but small enough that nobody's job title includes looking after it. That gap is the single most common cause of the jobs we see from here.
Distribution and light manufacturing along the A120 corridor, with a retail and outlet presence out of proportion to the town's size and estates spread toward Witham and Great Notley.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Mid-sized business systems with no dedicated IT behind them. Stock and warehouse databases, EPOS and retail records, small file and application servers. Failed or degraded backups that nobody had checked are a recurring feature rather than an occasional one.
Before you do anything else. Check whether the backup actually ran before you assume you have one. On the jobs we see from here, it usually had not for some months.
Alongside that there is the ordinary run of household work that every area produces: laptops that stopped starting, external drives full of photographs, camera cards formatted by mistake. Those are from £250 to £300 +VAT and are frequently the quickest jobs we handle. Business and array work from Braintree and across Cambridgeshire starts from £500 +VAT.
The same whether you walk it in or send it by courier.
Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or insured post from Braintree. Send the bare drive rather than the whole machine where you can.
The fault is classified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — because that decides the route, the price and the realistic odds.
One figure, agreed before anything is touched, and it does not move afterwards. If software would do it, or nothing can be recovered, you hear that instead.
Imaged read-only, rebuilt from the copy, verified by opening files rather than counting them, and returned on fresh media with free shipping back to Braintree.
It costs us the job and it is still the right answer. You would rather hear it now than after an invoice.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy your files off yourself, most important first, then stop using it. There is nothing we add to a drive you can still read.
The material is held elsewhere for compliance. Regulated and legal work is frequently archived somewhere nobody asked about — a compliance system, a practice management platform, an outsourced store. Worth one call before you assume it has gone.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Reputable read-only software, installed to a different drive, will often do it for a fraction of what we would charge.
The backup did run after all. Not every failed backup notification means a failed backup. Check the actual media before writing it off.
Send the device over with a short account of what happened to it. The diagnostic costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing before anything is opened.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Tell us what the device is, what it is doing, and anything already tried — an engineer will come back with a realistic view of the odds and a price band, before you commit to posting anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01223 655015.
Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm. We’re about thirty-seven miles away via the M11 and A120, roughly 50 minutes. Or post it insured — return shipping is free either way.
We can give you the band immediately — the published prices start at £250 plus VAT for cards and £300 for a single drive. The exact figure is fixed in writing after the free 48-hour diagnostic, and it does not move afterwards.
Switch it off and leave it off. Clicking means the heads cannot find their servo data, and every further power-on risks scoring the surface. How long it ran after the first noise affects the result more than anything we do.
Regularly. NDAs signed as standard, one named contact from diagnostic to delivery, invoicing rather than card payment for established firms, and a written account of what failed for insurers or auditors.
From £250 plus VAT for cards and USB media, from £300 plus VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage, £550 plus VAT flat for a Fusion Drive, and from £500 plus VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — each quoted in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Occasionally, on a logical fault with healthy hardware dropped in early. Physical recoveries cannot be compressed that far — priority handling moves you to the front of the queue but cannot make a failing drive read faster.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 11 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.