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 when you understand what genuinely sets the cost of recovery you will see why there can be a tenfold difference in quotes across the UK.
It makes very little difference to your final quote if you require back four gigabytes or four terabytes. What determines the quote is whether the drive needs to be opened, whether donor parts need to be used and how many devices need to be re-assembled together.
When you have an idea as to what really affects the price of recovery it may explain why some companies quote up to ten times as much as others for the same job.
Most people assume that recovering larger volumes of data will cost more. This is simply not true. To recover 40GB and 4TB from the same failed hard disk is the same work: the same imaging, the same reconstruction, the same verification. Therefore a company which charges on a volume basis is charging you for what you stand to lose rather than for what it has to do.
The real elements affecting the cost of recovery include what type of hardware is required to recover from; be it a physical failure of the unit or a logical failure; if it's an array how many units are involved; and do we need special parts for the recovery. All four are determinants and can be known before we start any work — thus a fixed quote is possible.
All + VAT. Fixed in writing once we've completed your free diagnostic. We're publishing our own. Use them as a baseline.
£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
£400 flat — 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: the cost for a standard single drive will vary by firm and issue type and can range from approximately £250 to £600, with array work from £500 upward. Any costs less than that amount, likely indicate the quoted price will change upon opening the drive. Costs greater than that amount should be questioned as to why the price was quoted at such a level.
None of them are technical; the answers say much more than the price says.
If a price increases after the drive has been opened, then it's not a quote; it is an opening offer. Enquire if there is any possibility of the quote changing.
Percentages are based upon an agreement where a company has an interest in what your information is worth and in your belief that recovery is feasible. Percentages indicate your best interest is at risk.
Perhaps the most important of the questions above. A company without a clear answer may be either new to recovery services or unwilling to give one. Honest boundaries are few and well known.
Many UK data recovery firms subcontract a meaningful share of their work onward to a smaller number of larger labs – more hands, more transit, more individuals have access to your information. Understand this before posting anything.
Specifically stated, and not as a slogan, due to how loosely this term is applied across the industry.
On most recovery attempts, if the recovery process fails there will be no payment made for those services. The diagnostic service is provided free and there will be no invoicing for failed attempts.
The 50% down payment is used for all tasks requiring actual hands-on, physical drive-level work such as opening a drive, fitting donor parts or component-level board repair. This requires the service provider to spend money once the job has been started regardless of the final condition of the drives. Payment for the remaining half of the total cost will only be made if the job is successful.
There are three types of jobs that always have their prices charged based upon the completion of the task, i.e., regardless of how the work turns out. Those three areas are: Forensic examination: We charge for the forensic examination process no matter what conclusion we come to. Whether our investigation reveals wrongdoing or not, at least one party involved in the case will benefit from knowing what really happened. CCTV and DVR recovery: Reverse engineering the proprietary formats of these systems can take just as many days to complete regardless of whether or not any usable footage was overwritten. Data destruction: For data destruction services, the end result is what we are paid for. Our customer is informed prior to beginning the work which of these applies.
Prices vary widely among firms, depending upon the nature of the failure. A typical price for recovering data from a single hard drive ranges from about £250 to £600. Prices for recovering data from larger configurations, such as arrays and servers start at £500. Our fees are clearly posted on-line, ranging from £250 for card-based failures to £300 for recovering data from a single failing hard disk to £500+ for RAID configurations.
No. Recovering 40 GB of data versus recovering 4 TB of data from the same failed drive would represent approximately the same amount of work. Service providers who quote prices based upon the volume of data recovered are pricing by what you stand to lose rather than by the actual effort put into a particular job.
Generally, because these prices aren't fixed. A common pattern is an initial low quote price that increases when the drive is open; ask if your quote price can change.
For most work, there will be no charge at all for a failed recovery. Work at the physical drive level is an exception. For physical drive level work, we require a 50% deposit as we have already incurred costs such as purchasing replacement parts and labour prior to completion. In these cases, the remaining amount due is paid upon successful completion. Forensic, CCTV and data destruction services are charged whatever the outcome.
You probably won't need to. A diagnostic fee typically means you pay to know if your problem can be resolved. Our diagnostic service is free and carries no obligation to purchase a service from us – even if our opinion is that your needs could be met with free software.
Yes, and compare more than just price. Ask: is their quoted figure fixed? Are they charging a percent? What cannot they recover from your data? And is the work done in-house? The differences between firms are found in those four answers far quicker than the number itself.