Universities and research groups make up a steady share of the bench here, and the work has a character of its own: almost none of it has commercial value and almost all of it is impossible to reproduce. Departmental arrays, supervisors’ laptops, fieldwork drives and student machines — recovered in Cambridge by the engineers who assessed them, kept confidential, and never sent out of the country.
Research arrays, departmental servers and student drives, handled by our own engineers under UK data residency and returned on media you keep.
Not a sector we have added. The single largest category of work that reaches this bench, because of where it sits.
Vision Park is three miles from the Science Park and a short run from Addenbrooke's, Granta Park and Babraham. What that produces is a steady flow of work that most recovery laboratories see occasionally and we see weekly: doctoral data on one unbacked external, sequencing output on a lab drive nobody owns, instrument PCs running acquisition software older than the student using them.
The technical work is frequently ordinary. What is not ordinary is the consequence. A failed drive in a commercial office costs a company a day. A failed drive holding four years of doctoral fieldwork costs somebody a degree, and there is no second copy because there was never a system that made one.
One external drive, three or four years old, carrying the entire output of a research degree. No cloud sync, no departmental backup, and a submission date in the calendar.
Microscopes, spectrometers, chromatography rigs and test benches driven by machines running software that will not install on anything current. Frequently IDE or early SATA.
A lab NAS bought by a postdoc who has since left, holding a decade of group data. No one is watching the alerts and no one is certain what is on it.
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.
Tell us the submission date on the first call. Where it is close, the right approach is often not the fastest full recovery — it is extracting the specific chapters, datasets or figures you need first and releasing those while the rest completes.
That costs no more. It is simply a different order of work, and it is the difference between submitting and applying for an extension. We cannot do it if we find out about the deadline in week two.
We are used to how universities buy things. Invoicing to a department or grant code rather than to an individual, purchase orders raised before work begins, and quotations in a form a finance office will accept are all routine rather than special requests.
Where the data is unpublished, confidentiality terms are available and the work stays in-house. Nothing is subcontracted, no data leaves the UK, and one named engineer handles the job from diagnostic to delivery.
Ring rather than emailing, and say when you submit. Free diagnostic in 48 hours, and where the deadline is tight we will extract the chapters you need first and complete the rest afterwards.
Yes. Purchase orders, departmental invoicing and grant codes are routine. Tell us at the diagnostic and we will send whatever your finance office needs.
Work is carried out in-house by our own engineers, nothing is subcontracted, no data leaves the UK, and we will sign a non-disclosure agreement before the media arrives.
Say so at the diagnostic. Where equipment must go back into service we can return the recovery as a bootable clone on modern media rather than as a folder of files.
Yes, and it costs nothing. Ask whoever administers the machine whether it is backed up centrally, and check OneDrive or SharePoint version history. A meaningful share of these end there.
From £300 +VAT for a single drive, £500 +VAT for arrays, fixed in writing after the free 48-hour diagnostic.