Same imaging, same reconstruction, same verification. A firm pricing by volume recovered is pricing by what you stand to lose rather than by what it has to do — and understanding what genuinely sets the cost explains why UK quotes vary by a factor of ten.
Whether you need back four gigabytes or four terabytes barely moves the figure. What moves it is whether the drive has to be opened, whether donor parts are involved, and how many devices must be reassembled together.
Understanding what actually drives cost explains why estimates across the industry differ by a factor of ten.
The commonest assumption is that recovering more data costs more. It does not. Retrieving 40GB and 4TB from the same failed drive is the same work: the same imaging, the same reconstruction, the same verification. A firm pricing by volume recovered is pricing by what you stand to lose rather than by what it has to do.
What genuinely determines cost is the device, whether the fault is physical or logical, how many members are involved if it is an array, and whether specialist parts are needed. Those are the four, and they are all knowable before work starts — which is why a fixed quote is possible at all.
All plus VAT, fixed in writing after a free diagnostic. These are ours; use them as a benchmark.
£250 — memory cards and USB sticks
£300 — single hard drives, SSDs and NVMe, laptops, desktops, external drives, and Macs with removable storage
£550 flat — Fusion Drive Macs, which are two devices recovered and recombined into one volume
from £500 — RAID arrays, NAS units, servers and databases
£800 flat — BitLocker-encrypted drives, and CCTV, DVR or NVR footage
from £800 — virtual machines and forensic examination
from £1,250 — enterprise SAN, quoted after scoping
Where the UK market sits: a single drive typically runs from around £250 to £600 depending on the firm and the fault, and array work from £500 upward. Figures far below that band usually mean the quote can change once the drive is open. Figures far above it are worth questioning directly.
None are technical, and the answers tell you more than a price does.
A price that can rise once the drive is opened is not a quote — it is an opening position. Ask directly whether the figure you have been given can change.
Percentage arrangements give a firm an interest in what your data is worth and in you believing recovery is possible. Both point away from your interests.
The most useful question on the list. A firm with no ready answer is either inexperienced or unwilling to say. The honest limits are short and well known.
A meaningful share of UK data recovery is subcontracted onward to a handful of larger labs — more hands, more transit, more people with access to your data. Worth knowing before you post anything.
Stated exactly rather than as a slogan, because the phrase is used loosely across the industry.
On most work, if the recovery fails you pay nothing at all. The diagnostic is free and an unsuccessful attempt produces no invoice.
Where physical drive-level work is needed — opening a drive under filtered air, fitting donor parts, component-level board repair — there is a 50% deposit, because those costs are committed the moment work begins whatever the platters turn out to look like. The balance is payable only on success.
Three services sit outside no fix, no fee entirely. Forensic examination, because establishing that nothing improper happened is a legitimate and valuable result. CCTV and DVR recovery, because reverse-engineering the format takes the same days whether or not your footage survived the overwrite loop. And data destruction, where the work is the outcome. You are told which applies before committing, not afterwards.
A single drive typically runs from around £250 to £600 depending on the firm and the fault, with array and server work from £500 upward. Ours are published: from £250 for cards, £300 for a single drive, from £500 for RAID.
No. Recovering 40GB or 4TB from the same failed drive is identical work. Anyone pricing by volume recovered is pricing by what you stand to lose rather than by what the job actually involves.
Usually because they are not fixed. A low opening figure that rises once the drive is opened is a common pattern — worth asking directly whether the price you have been given can change.
On most work, no recovery means no charge at all. Physical drive-level work takes a 50% deposit because donor parts and clean-air time are committed up front, with the balance only on success. Forensic, CCTV and data destruction sit outside it.
You should not need to. A diagnostic fee means paying to be told whether you can be helped. Ours is free with no obligation — including when the honest answer is that free software would do the job.
Yes, and compare on more than price. Ask whether the quote is fixed, whether they charge a percentage, what they cannot recover, and whether the work is done in-house. Those four answers separate firms faster than a number does.