Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. An affluent market town on the edge of the M11 corridor, with Chesterford Research Park to the north and Stansted a short run down the motorway.
Roughly 30 minutes and 18 miles separate Saffron Walden from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Great Chesterford, Newport, Thaxted and the wider Essex area.
Eighteen miles south down the M11, half an hour. One of the simpler runs in and a common drop-off on the way to Stansted.
Saffron Walden is affluent, small and professional, with a commuter population and a business base of consultancies, practices and one-person firms working from home. The recovery work is accordingly domestic in form but commercial in consequence: a consultant's laptop holds the practice, and there is rarely an IT function behind it. We also see a steady run of genuinely old family material from here — scanned photographs and documents on media from the 2000s that has sat in a drawer and is now unreadable.
An affluent market town on the edge of the M11 corridor, with Chesterford Research Park to the north and Stansted a short run down the motorway.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Home-based professional practices and personal archives. Consultants' and practitioners' laptops with no backup behind them, plus ageing family media — early external drives, optical discs and memory cards from the 2000s that have degraded in storage rather than failed in use.
Before you do anything else. On old family media, do not keep retrying it. Repeated mount attempts on a degraded disc or card are how partially readable material becomes unreadable.
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 Saffron Walden 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 Saffron Walden. 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 Saffron Walden.
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 eighteen miles away via the M11, roughly 30 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.