A free 48hr diagnosis. The fixed cost of recovery will be agreed prior to any work. There are no charges for the majority of jobs if we can't recover your data. Serving Altrincham and all areas of Greater Manchester.
Altrincham is approximately 25 minutes away by car and about 8 miles. Drop it off yourself, or send via postal service.
We cover Sale, Hale & Bowdon & all other parts of Greater Manchester.
Altrincham is about eight miles south-west of us, approximately 25 mins outside peak hours using the A56 & M56. Many people use their stop-off point when passing through to drop items off.
The professional service sector provides the foundation for Altrincham's business, as does its well-known market-led redevelopment of the town centre, and a large number of small consultancies and creative businesses. We see this as a unique combination of types of work; consultancy laptop drives, architecture/design practice data files, and residential computers from the residential area through to Hale and Bowdon. Small professional service firms with two to twenty employees are the dominant type of client in Altrincham. They have everything stored on a single Network Attached Storage (NAS), and they do not have an IT department they can contact when issues arise.
These are drawn from the jobs that are sent to us, as opposed to being selected out of a capability list.
In essence, Altrincham's professional service sector and the well-known redevelopment of the town centre create the types of recovery work we get. This translates into consultancy laptops, data files from design/architecture practices, and residential computers from the residential area through to Hale and Bowdon. A different mix from what you would find elsewhere, which will determine our quotes and response times.
Small professional service firms dominate our Altrincham work. These firms typically consist of two to twenty employees. All their data is housed on a single NAS. As such, these firms typically do not have an internal IT support team.
In addition to that, there's a regular load of household jobs that each area seems to produce: laptops that will no longer boot up, external drives stuffed with photos, camera cards that have been formatted by error. These are from £250 to £300 + VAT and are usually the most quickly completed of all our jobs. Work for businesses and arrays from Altrincham and around Greater Manchester begins at £500 + VAT.
Regardless of whether the job is walked in or sent via a courier service, the steps are the same.
Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN. Monday to Friday 9 am to 5:30 pm. Or insured post from Altrincham. We do not accept whole laptops or desktop systems so please take out the hard drive or SSD before sending.
The fault type will be identified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — so the route, pricing and probability of recovery can be determined.
There is one price quoted prior to the job being worked on, which doesn’t change once accepted. If software would do the job, or no recovery is possible, then that will be communicated to you instead.
We image as read-only. Rebuild from the copy. Verify by opening files not counting them. Then ship back on new media free to Altrincham.
Everyone loses when you waste time going to see an expert unnecessarily.
Phones and tablets. This is not something we take on; modern mobile devices have such sophisticated encryption schemes to protect your data that attempting to recover information via third parties is extremely difficult, so if images are what matter to you, realistically using iCloud, Google Photos or a backup is the most likely solution, as opposed to a lab.
Soldered Mac storage on a dead board. The flash is soldered onto T2 and Apple Silicon systems along with being encrypted by the security chip. Therefore, once that main board dies, there will be absolutely no one able to recover anything off that board – none of us, nor Apple, nor those who quote four figures for extracting at the board level.
Encryption without the key. BitLocker, FileVault and hardware encrypted drives are opened only through providing credentials. Before calling us check with your IT team; they may hold the escrowed keys — more often than you'd think.
Send the device in with an initial report of what has occurred to it. The diagnosis is at no charge and commits you to nothing, and the subsequent fee is written as a firm price prior to opening anything.
This is the only step that requires input from you and nothing else can happen until the device is on our bench. Package your item properly and include all the information we require about you and your item(s), then ship them to us. Then comes a no-cost diagnostic, followed by a written quote.
Posting it? Use a tracked and insured service. The value of what is on the drive far exceeds the cost of postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm, and it still needs packing as described above for the journey.
Tell us about the item in question, tell us how it has been behaving lately, and let us know if there is anything you have done as far as troubleshooting goes so that our engineers may provide a realistic estimate of success and a probable cost range prior to sending your items off.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
Yes – Altrincham, and the areas close to it such as Sale, Hale and Bowdon. We’re about eight miles away via the A56 and M56, which takes roughly twenty-five minutes. Both drop-off and insured post begin the exact same 48-hour free diagnostic.
From £250 + VAT for cards and USB media; from £300 + VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage; £550 + VAT flat rate for a Fusion Drive; and from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS & servers — each quoted in writing after a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic.
A normal 48-hour turnaround is expected for the diagnostic. A single drive generally takes 3–4 working days from approval to completion. Longer lead-times are anticipated for array & donor part projects, and you receive the estimated timeline with your quote.
We would like you to remove your hard drive or SSD and just send us the actual drive — we cannot work on a full laptop or desktop system. The average computer shop in Altrincham can do that in minutes. If you want to send an external unit then they should be sent fully enclosed.
In most cases you pay nothing. We provide a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic, and in the event that we cannot recover data from your device — again in most cases — there is no additional charge — except for forensic examination, CCTV & data destruction which are explicitly identified when providing an estimate.
Yes. Your data will remain here within the UK, your work will never be outsourced, our non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are signed as standard for all commercial work, and working copies of your files are kept only for the retention period you decide, then destroyed.
We have no diagnostic charge to pay, most jobs do not require a payment unless the data is successfully recovered, and since our office in Manchester is only 8 miles from where you live and work, walking it in or sending it through the post (insured) makes little difference to you — either method begins in exactly the same way.