We offer a free 48-hour diagnostic. A single fixed price for the recovery will be agreed in writing prior to anything being opened. In most cases, you only pay if we recover your data. Bury St Edmunds is a market town which includes a large professional service sector (solicitors, land agents and accountants), as well as the brewing and food industry and the Suffolk Business Park on its eastern side.
The distance to our bench from Bury St Edmunds is approximately thirty miles and roughly forty minutes. We can accept your drive in person; alternatively, just send it in the post.
Covering Thurston, Great Barton, Ixworth and the wider Suffolk area.
It is thirty miles east of us via the A14, which takes around forty minutes. The entire length of this route is straight dual carriageway.
Bury St Edmunds is a market town with a large number of professionals and a large service sector for agriculture: solicitors, land agents and accountants, and also the brewing and food industry around Greene King and the sugar factory. The work here is document-based and record-based recovery rather than technical: there are case files, land and estate records, and financial records from decades ago. This type of information is required by law to be retained, and has quietly sat on one ageing server since the last IT upgrade.
A market town with a large professional sector made up of law, property and accounting firms, alongside the food and brewing industries and the Suffolk Business Park, which is at the eastern end of the town.
Drawn directly from what has been done, not from some sort of capabilities list.
Professional-practice data. Solicitor's client files and land documents. Estate data for agricultural agents. Accountant's archive with statutory retention requirements. Older servers and older RAID sets (usually found to be failing only when someone needs an archived file that was created eleven years ago).
Before you do anything else. Do not start working until you have stopped the automatic back-up on your practice server. More recoveries here are lost because of an active auto-backup job over a dying volume than because of failing hardware.
In addition to that, we also receive many examples of standard day-to-day household computer problems, which occur within every community, such as laptops that won’t start again, external drives containing your family photos, and memory cards formatted by mistake on one of your cameras. The cost for these items ranges from £250 to £300 plus VAT, and they are often amongst the fastest services we provide. Business and array work from Bury St Edmunds and throughout Cambridgeshire begins at £500 plus VAT.
It makes no difference if you hand-deliver the item or send it via courier.
First get a quote either by using our form or by phoning us. We will then ask you to deliver your drive to Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm, without needing an appointment. Alternatively you may post the drive insured from Bury St Edmunds. Only send the drive, as we don't accept complete laptops, PCs or Macs.
Whether the fault is classified as mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical will determine the route for repair, cost and real probability of success.
There is one number agreed prior to opening up the device. The number never changes after that. Instead, if there is software available to accomplish this task, or if nothing can be salvaged, then you will hear this.
Imaged read-only, rebuilt using the image, checked by accessing files rather than counting them, and copied to new media and delivered via free shipping back to Bury St Edmunds.
None of them will gain us any income. They are here simply as we get calls about all four of them most weeks.
The drive still mounts and reads. You should be copying your data off immediately, most important files first, and stopping use of this disk. There is no additional value that a lab adds to a drive that you can still open.
The system is still running on a mirror. Usually the data remains “live” on a degraded RAID 1 or 5. Taking a backup of it before you do anything else is a much less expensive option than recovering your data.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Read-only software (installed to a different drive) often handles this at a significantly lower cost than our standard service, if your drive itself is sound.
There is an older copy you have forgotten. A backup taken two years ago on an external hard drive; a laptop you replaced, with all the old stuff stored on it; a backup sent to your accountant... Many enquiries resolve themselves quickly, within five minutes, at no charge to you.
Get a quote first. This can be done by phone or with our online form. Send the device to us with a brief account of what happened to it. The diagnostic is cost-free and obliges you to nothing. The figure that follows will then be fixed in writing before anything is opened.
Once you have a quote, nothing else can be done until the device is on the workbench. As such, this is the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, add your details and post/deliver it with no appointment required. All that follows is a free diagnostic and a written quotation price, in that order.
Using postal services? Please use a method that has tracking and insurance; the value of what is on the drive far outweighs the cost of postage. If bringing in personally, please bring this item Monday to Friday, from 9am until 5:30pm without requiring an appointment, but again, please pack items carefully for transport.
Please provide information about the unit including what it is doing and any troubleshooting performed prior to contacting us. An engineer will then contact you to outline their professional assessment of the prospects along with a price range prior to you sending anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01223 655015.
First get a price quote from us by telephone or using our web-form. Then come see us in person at Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD. The hours we work in person are 9am to 5:30pm, Monday to Friday. No appointment is required. It will take approximately forty minutes to drive the roughly thirty miles here from Bury St Edmunds via the A14. Either post it with insurance or drop it off; both options include free return shipping.
We will provide the price band immediately: the listed costs begin at £250 plus VAT for card data and £300 for a single drive. The exact cost is fixed in writing after the initial 48-hour complimentary diagnostic, and this cost will not change.
Switch it off immediately and leave it off. Clicking means the heads cannot find their servo data, and every time you turn it back on again there is an increased risk of damaging the hard disk drive surfaces. The length of time it was running after its first audible click will have a greater effect on recovery success than anything else we can do.
We do, regularly. We use NDAs by default, one named point of contact from diagnostic through to delivery, invoice established firms instead of using credit/debit cards, and provide a detailed report describing what failed (for audit and insurance purposes).
Our pricing starts at £250 plus VAT for cards and USB drives, then from £300 plus VAT for a single drive, or for laptops and Macs equipped with removable storage, with £550 plus VAT being our flat price for a Fusion Drive. Our prices for RAID, NAS and server systems start from £500 plus VAT; each quote is made in writing after we complete your complimentary 48-hour diagnostic.
It's rare, but possible with a logical error on good hardware dropped off early. We cannot compress a physical recovery that far: although priority treatment puts you ahead of everyone else in line, it does nothing to speed up how quickly your bad drive reads.
We don't charge anything to diagnose your issue. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Our office is located in Cambridge, which is roughly thirty miles from you, as opposed to being on the other side of a courier network. Both options (walking it in or sending it insured) begin with getting a quote.