Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Cambridge Science Park sits at Junction 33, one junction along from our bench at Junction 32.
Roughly 10 minutes and 3 miles separate Cambridge from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Histon, Impington, Milton and the wider Cambridgeshire area.
Cambridge city centre is three miles south of the bench, ten minutes down Milton Road or twenty on the guided busway. Most Cambridge jobs are walked in.
Cambridge is a research city before it is anything else, and the recovery work reflects that almost exactly. What arrives from the CB postcodes is disproportionately unbacked intellectual work: doctoral data on a single external drive, lab instrument PCs running acquisition software older than the student using it, and startup laptops holding the only copy of a codebase between funding rounds. The biotech and semiconductor cluster on the science parks adds a steady run of RAID and NAS jobs where a small firm has outgrown its storage without ever formalising a backup.
Cambridge Science Park sits at Junction 33, one junction along from our bench at Junction 32. St John's Innovation Centre, Cambridge Business Park, the Biomedical Campus at Addenbrooke's, Granta Park at Great Abington and the Babraham Research Campus all fall inside our usual collection radius.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
The pattern here is single-copy research data. Dissertations and thesis chapters on one USB stick, sequencing output on a lab drive nobody owns, instrument PCs where the acquisition software will not run on anything newer. Alongside that sit the science-park array jobs — four-bay NAS units bought when the company was five people and never revisited at fifty.
Before you do anything else. Stop using the machine. On a university or research machine that means telling whoever administers it not to run a repair utility or a reinstall, because on shared systems that is usually the next thing somebody tries.
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 Cambridge 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 Cambridge. 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 Cambridge.
It costs us the job. It is still the right answer, and you would rather hear it now.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy the files off yourself, most important first, then stop using it. A laboratory adds nothing to a disk you can already read.
It is on a University or institutional system. Departmental and college machines are frequently backed up centrally without the user knowing. One email to whoever administers it resolves more of these than any technical work we could do.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Reputable read-only software, installed to a different drive, will often do it for a fraction of our fee. We will tell you which tools are worth trying.
Your BitLocker key exists after all. On a work or institutional machine it is almost certainly held centrally in Azure AD or Intune. Ask before you assume it is gone.
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 three miles away via the A14 and Milton Road, roughly 10 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.